


But I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles, And I Would Walk Five Hundred More

by luninosity



Series: 500 Miles [1]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Abduction, Aftercare, All The Love, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, And Everyone Loves Charles, Angst, Art, Artist!Erik, BDSM, Breathplay, But Also Charles Helping Save Himself, But It'll All Be Okay, Caning, Charles Being Both Awesome And Broken, Chess, Comfort, Confessions, Consensual Kink, Emma Has An Avenging Army, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Sex, Erik has Issues, Erik's In Love, Escort Service, Escort!Charles, Eventual Happy Endings, Explicit Sexual Content, Falling In Love, First Date, Fisting, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Healing, Holding Hands, Hope, Introspection, Kisses, Kitchen Sex, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Massage, More Cuddling, Naked Cuddling, Not Really Sure How Best To Tag This One, Oral Sex, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Past Relationship(s), Past Sexual Abuse, Pizza, Protective Erik, Rape Recovery, Rape/Non-con Elements, Really Quite A Lot Of Kinky Sex Though, Recovery, References to Child Abuse, References to Past Child Abuse, Rescue, Revelations, Scones, Secrets, Shared Tea, Shaw Being Evil, Shaw Being a Manipulative Bastard, Showers, Six Days Is Not A Week, Spanking, Very Brief Contemplation of Self-Harm, but that's okay, except not exactly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-09-09
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:06:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 107,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a prompt on tumblr a while back that went like this: <i>Charles goes to hire an escort himself from (who else?) Emma Frost’s service, sees a photo of artist!Erik and tries to book him, only to find Erik’s photo was misplaced and Erik is himself a client looking for an escort for a gallery opening… so Charles gets Emma to let him show up as Erik’s escort. Erik mistakes him for a rich donor and they spend the evening talking and probably bickering in a very UST way because Erik probably hates people like that. And Erik’s seething because he paid good money for his date and he never showed up. And later Charles follows Erik to his limo and quips, “oh, I think I’m supposed to be your date tonight?” with a cheeky little smile.</i> </p><p>Except my brain decided that there would be plot and secrets and Sebastian Shaw and Charles having an actual mission and Erik worrying and hurt/comfort and an NC-17 rating and I don't even know.</p><p>TL;DR: In which Charles isn't really an escort, Erik thinks he only wants a one-night stand, everybody's got a past, and there's quite a lot of sex on the way to the happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Emma

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [But I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles, And I Would Walk Five Hundred More](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12853140) by [tiffsny880503](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiffsny880503/pseuds/tiffsny880503)



> The Prologue (and eventual Epilogue) is Emma's POV; everything else is either Erik or Charles. Chapter two up possibly later tonight!
> 
> Title, opening, and closing lines come from The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)".

  
_but I would walk five hundred miles_   
_and I would walk five hundred more_   
_just to be the man who walks a thousand miles_   
_to fall down at your door_   


 

“No,” she says. “No, Charles, absolutely not.”

“Why not?” Charles tips his head to the side, grins at her. It’s a devastating grin, extraordinary and enticing. Emma, to her mild disgust, is not thoroughly immune. But she pretends to be.

“He’s looking for an escort,” she stresses. “A gentleman of the evening. A temporary liaison, Charles. In other words, _not_ another client.”

“Erik Lehnsherr.” Charles isn’t listening to her. He’s looking at Erik’s picture, instead: short-cropped auburn-dark hair, strong lines, pale green-grey-blue eyes. No smile in sight. “The artist. He does metal-work. Sculpture; I’ve seen his pieces on display. I think I’d like him, don’t you?”

“Charles,” Emma sighs, “no.” Charles is young, and beautiful, and eminently approachable. He doesn’t tend to like people, however; or, rather, he does, but only at a surface level, the casual acquaintanceships that’re all absolutely genuine and full of externally directed compassion and reveal nothing of himself. Charles likes other people, for a given value of like, and gives away no secrets.

She’s wondered about that, on occasion. Has concluded that that’s why he comes here, to her extremely select establishment. Discretion. Class. Financial transactions, no expectations.

What she doesn’t know is why. What happened, to make the lovely boy who’s heir to the Xavier fortune so polite, and so cool, and so distant, and so desperate.

She’s heard the stories, after. Read the employee reports. Charles likes to be tied down, to be fucked hard, to be bruised and called names and, on occasion, slapped. Hot wax and belts and handcuffs and gags; begging, and dubious-at-best consent, though of course it isn’t when Charles has paid in advance. Logan’d told her once, in confidence and over whiskey, that that elegant well-muscled body has a map of old scars, nothing caused by her escorts, of course, and invisible in those tailored suits, in the way he carries himself, assured and calm.

Charles is always a generous tipper, and unfailingly polite. He says thank you, after.

“What does he want?” Charles picks up the picture. “For tomorrow evening, I mean.”

“He really only wants an escort.”

This gets her a raised eyebrow.

“He wants someone to accompany him to his exhibition. Arm candy, generally speaking, though he’d prefer someone who can—what was his phrase?—charm the wealthy idiots so he doesn’t have to.”

Charles laughs. “I can certainly manage that. Anything else?”

“He didn’t specify. But I assume sex isn’t out of the question.”

“Sex is never out of the question. When and where?”

“Charles,” Emma tries, one more time. “Don’t. I’ll send someone. He wasn’t terribly picky, to be honest. He’d get on well with Piotr, I think…”

“Everyone gets on well with Piotr.” Including Charles, who, if memory serves her correctly—and it unfailingly does—had urged the muscular Russian to pin him against the wall by his throat, not insignificant cock buried deep in his body, trying to scream and unable to as the climax hit.

Piotr’d come into her office the next day shaking, looking sick: “I can’t, Miss Emma, not with him, he’s too…he thanked me, with the bruises around his neck, and offered to pay for my sister’s art classes this summer, and I can’t…”

Charles had never said anything, not batted an eye, when Piotr’d been unavailable on all of his infrequent visits after.

“Still,” Charles says, gaze focused on the photograph. “He needs someone who will…make an impression. Who won’t be intimidated by him, either.”

“You’re not one of my escorts,” Emma says. “This is off the books. And you understand we’re not legally obligated to do anything if this goes badly.” She might not be able to stop Charles, but possibly she can scare him.

“Understood.” He runs a thumbtip along the side of the picture, absently. Winces, puts his thumb in his mouth, catching the trickle of red. “Paper-cut. Sorry.”

“Charles,” Emma says, and gets up and comes around her desk. He’s a client. She doesn’t care, not like that. But they comprehend each other, in certain ways. They always have. “Bandage?”

“No.” One more little touch, like a caress, to Lehnsherr’s printed face. “He looks…lonely. Don’t you think?”

Her first impulse is to snort and say no, not the activist artist she’s heard of, the angry protester for social justice with those stern lines around his lips. But Charles sees something there, and she does trust Charles’s insight. He’s good at reading people; that’s one reason she lets him in this far, to her inner sanctum. He’d been right and she’d been wrong about Victor Creed and the violent tendencies, six months before, and young Marie’d been saved a trip to the hospital because Charles had looked up and shaken his head and said “you didn’t let this one in the door, did you?” and they’d both run two floors down to the room just in time.

So he’s likely not wrong this time either.

And maybe, she thinks, he’s seeing something that he needs to see. Because Emma Frost is also good at reading people; she’s had to be, commanding New York’s most prestigious escort service the way she has. And Charles is, she suspects, under all the calm worldly amusement and the inexplicable desire to be broken and used up and shattered, very much alone.

She says, “I’ll tell him we’ll send someone. Seven-thirty. Don’t be late.”

“Emma,” Charles says, “you’re marvelous,” and throws her one more coruscating grin as he leaves, apparently just because.

Emma sits down in her luxurious white-leather office chair—highly impractical, but deceptively comfortable, which is entirely the point—and hopes to hell she’s done the right thing.


	2. Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik meets Charles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I already have a lot written, but I feel like I shouldn't overwhelm you with fic! Updates maybe once a week? Twice? In the next chapter, we get Charles-perspective...

Erik Lehnsherr is annoyed.  
  
This is not an unusual state for him, he has to admit. He spends much of his time annoyed: at the ridiculous injustices of the world, at a society that dictates who he should be and with whom he should sleep, at the wide-eyed pretentious hipsters who gawk at his art like they’re capable of comprehending it.  
  
They know nothing about him. About his past, about his parents, about his life.  
  
He weaves sculptures out of metal and heat and light, and listens to the babbling praise about gracefulness and industry and courage, and they don’t speak words about rage and hungry nights and bitterness, and he loathes them all.  
  
He leans idly against the wall. At the moment, the low-level loathing’s been superseded by a very specific irritation: he’d requested an escort from Frost Services, someone to sparkle on his arm and show everyone, including Sebastian—don’t think about Sebastian, he admonishes himself—just how far he’s come, just how much he doesn’t care.   
  
And the escort’s running late. This is not acceptable.  
  
On the other hand, he’s also watching a lovely little bit of jailbait flirt with the bartender, in the corner, so he isn’t complaining as much as he could be. The boy has dark buoyant hair and a backside that, when he leans forward, is just begging to be cupped and fondled and spanked, and his graceful body’s clothed in the kind of suit Erik could never afford in a thousand years of work, and he looks like exactly what he no doubt is, a trust-fund child, spoiled and arrogant and here to fling some money at the romantic artistic ideal.  
  
Erik wonders how old he is. He _can’t_ be legal, not with that height and that mischievous smile; but the bartender’s smiling back and handing over two martinis regardless.  
  
Two?  
  
Someone taps him on the shoulder, and Erik turns. It’s Azazel. “You’re a failure,” he says, without preamble.  
  
“Why? For what reason?”  
  
“You recommended Frost Services. The promised escort isn’t here.”  
  
Azazel frowns. He’s wearing devil horns and red body paint tonight, some sort of bizarre artistic expression, Erik assumes. “They’ve never let me down.”  
  
The gorgeous boy’s out of sight, now. Erik frowns. Two martinis means the kid’s either got serious issues, or he’s here with someone, and for whatever reason Erik doesn’t want this particular object of his attention to be here, at _his_ exhibition, with someone else.  
  
“I’ll talk to Emma Frost,” he says, “in the morning.”  
  
“Really? About what?”  
  
It’s the kind of voice that parts crowds. That invites the most intimate of confidences, and gets men to die on spear-points before the towers of Troy. Accented and warm, sensual and complex: an English hot toddy spiked with cinnamon, exotic and intoxicating.  
  
Erik turns around.   
  
And it’s that dark hair, and pale skin, and, oh hell, blue eyes.   
  
He’s never seen anything so blue. And he’s traveled the globe: the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the historic sapphire waters of Greece, Mykonos, Crete…  
  
Nothing compares.  
  
“Charles Xavier,” say the blue eyes, and one hand offers him a martini. “Erik Lehnsherr, correct?”  
  
“I think I should leave now,” Azazel says, and does so, with alacrity for which Erik will later thank him.  
  
“Yes.” He takes the drink, automatically. The blue eyes gaze up at him, appreciatively.  
  
“I don’t sleep with minors,” Erik says, just to make this clear, and downs half his glass, because that’s likely the only relief he’s going to get tonight.  
  
“So nice to know, and a brilliant compliment.” Charles matches his drink, with effortless prowess. “Neither do I; and, in fact, I’m twenty-two.”  
  
“You are not.”  
  
“I could show you my birth certificate if you’d like. Though half the people here would vouch for me, if necessary.”  
  
“Really,” Erik says, and fiddles with the martini glass. Somehow Charles has divined precisely the way he likes them: shaken, dry, straightforward. “You…know many of them, I take it?” Not subtle, but his brain’s busy shouting _oh thank you!_ to the universe at the moment, so really he’s lucky to be verbal.  
  
“Oh yes.” Charles leans against the wall beside him, propping it up with a casual shoulder. “The rather red-faced man over there, Judge Stryker…he used to have dinner with my parents, and insult the housemaids in fairly unspeakable ways. His wife donates to all the fashionable charitable causes and spends his money on jewelry and the pool boy’s college tuition. That man, in that corner…friends with my stepfather, which is all that needs to be said about that. And _he’s_ just given an impressive donation to Columbia University, though that’s only to get his name on the side of a building.”  
  
“So cynical,” Erik says, despite himself. Charles looks surprised. “I’m not, actually. Or not about people in general. I think the art, what you’re doing here, is marvelous, for example.”  
  
“You do.”  
  
“Completely.” Charles starts to wave an enthusiastic hand at the closest sculpture; recalls just in time that he’s holding a drink, and hands it to Erik, who takes it, bemusedly. “Take this one, for instance…it’s about struggle, isn’t it? The way that these two pieces constantly battle each other, never quite coming out on top, and never achieving the height they could otherwise?”  
  
Erik blinks.  
  
“It’s tragic,” Charles continues, “but it’s also hopeful, in a way.”  
  
“It…is not.”  
  
“Oh, yes, it is. Not in this piece, of course, but looking at it…we can see the other possibilities. If the antagonists would only learn to work together. The vision of negation suggests the other options, as well.”  
  
Erik blinks again. One comment. One casual comment, and he’ll never be able to look at his own work the same way again.  
  
“Or something,” Charles concludes, blithely, and reclaims his martini. “Would you like to meet some of them, then?”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“The rich and famous, of course.” A grin. “The wealthy. The patrons, Erik.”  
  
“…right.”  
  
They do. Charles sparkles. He can talk to everyone, Erik realizes, anyone, making them feel important and flattered and charmed, for those few moments. He stays on Erik’s arm like he belongs there, and Erik misses him, in the few moments it takes him to slip off and get another round of drinks for them, with irrational intensity.  
  
It’s ridiculous. No reason for his arm to feel empty. No reason at all.  
  
He forgets all about his promised escort, and his irritation. After all, Charles is here, and luscious and articulate, and if the escort had actually shown up, he suspects he’d not be having half as good a time.  
  
Charles poses for snapshots and publicity photographs with him, smiling, from all appearances affectionate and natural; puts his arm around Erik’s waist, breathes into his ear, and Erik thinks dazedly first that Sebastian will hate seeing these photos in the morning, and second that he doesn’t in fact give a damn about what Sebastian thinks, because Charles is licking his lips and tucking himself against Erik’s side like he’s always going to be there.  
  
“I have a limo,” Erik says, because he can’t say what he wants to say: you’re amazing, you’re gorgeous, you think about art, honestly think about it, and if you weren’t one of them, the trust-fund crowd, you’d be completely perfect in every way, if you’ll just let me take you home and ravish you now, please…  
  
“Do you?” Charles’s eyes dance. “Is there champagne in your limo?”  
  
“How much are you planning to drink?” Charles, while not precisely twiglike, isn’t _that_ big a person. And, while Erik’s not above seeing those endless eyes cheerfully tipsy, he’s also got morals which’re creakily reasserting themselves, to his own dismay. If Charles gets truly smashed, then there’s no such thing as consent, and Erik can’t and won’t do this without enthusiastic consent.  
  
“I’m fine,” Charles says, waving a hand. “Honestly. I was practically raised on hard liquor. Not in fact as fun as it sounds.”  
  
“Really,” Erik says. Something about the name—Xavier—is tugging at the back of his mind, but he can’t quite put a finger on it right now.  
  
He’d like to put fingers on other things, though. Starting with that sinfully hued mouth. And then lower.   
  
There’re two freckles on the bridge of Charles’s nose. They draw his attention like a magnet.  
  
“You have freckles,” he says, because evidently between the fourth martini and Charles’s undivided attention, searing through his body with the heat of a hundred bonfires, he’s lost any semblance of polite conversation.  
  
Charles laughs. He is, Erik concludes, a bit past tipsy, if he’s finding that pathetic a comment amusing. “I have quite a lot of freckles. Would you like to discover where else they might be?”  
  
“Certainly here.” He walks his hand up Charles’s forearm, bared by the rolled-up sleeve. “Of course, under here…” They’re standing out in front of the gallery, out in plain sight, waiting for the limo to come around, and the pleased little noise that Charles makes when Erik’s hand slips beneath his sleeve is positively indecent. Like they’re in bed already, or not even in bed; like he’d let Erik push him up against the closest wall and fuck him on the spot, no protest at all. He might even be wanting that. Prepared for it. Slick and wet beneath the expensive suit.  
  
It’s that kind of noise.  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, and that’s his hand untucking Charles’s shirt, sneakily, behind his back so that no one can see, covered by his coat, “you probably have freckles here, too, don’t you….your back, your hips…your thighs…should I find them all for you? Every last one?”   
  
It’s that noise and the alcohol. He’s drunk on martinis and the scent of Charles, the feel of him, soft creamy skin and unexpected muscle, curves only from that natural build and those enticing hips, no indulgent softness at all.  
  
“Limo,” Charles says.  
  
“…what?”  
  
“Your limo.” Charles looks at him through eyelashes, mock-innocent. “Is here.”  
  
“Fuck,” Erik mutters, out loud.   
  
Which is a mistake for all sorts of reasons, not least of which because Charles instantly smiles, slow and wicked, and murmurs, “Yes, sir, Mr Lehnsherr, but not in your rented limo,” and Erik’s brain short-circuits for a second.  
  
Charles smiles again, and hops in, and is already opening a bottle of champagne by the time Erik catches up and joins him.   
  
He has a hotel room. It’s not far. He’d figured that he might be out late, might bring that promised escort back, a financial transaction and nothing more, someone on whom he could unleash the tension of the night and the society façade, a quick dirty no-strings-attached fuck.  
  
Charles is…  
  
He doesn’t know what Charles is. No one’s mentioned any strings. There’s no indication that Charles expects anything from him at all beyond the night. And yet…  
  
Charles looked at his art, and read possibilities in it that surpass anything Erik’d ever dreamed.   
  
He wants more of that.  
  
And he wants to fuck Charles.  
  
Oh god does he ever want to fuck Charles. They’ve already made it to multiple bases in the limo, not that Erik exactly knows what that particular American metaphor equates to, but he figures that sticking his hand down Charles’s pants and leaving the imprint of his mouth on the delicate skin of that throat, red with stubble-scrape and wetness and more than a hint of teeth because Charles shuddered so delightfully at the first nip, has to qualify as a success.  
  
Charles had tasted like champagne and desire, and had begun flicking Erik’s shirt-buttons open one by one; Erik’d growled and grabbed that hand and pressed it to the swell of his aching cock in his trousers, and then held it there, because he liked the way that looked, his longer fingers over those shorter freckled ones, demanding and obscene.  
  
Charles had licked his lips, and begun stroking him through the insufficient fabric barrier of pants, not trying to pull away; leaning forward, in fact, to make it easier for Erik to hold him in place.  
  
Their limo driver had tactfully cleared his throat, at that point. “Sorry—” Erik had gasped, flung a random amount of money at him, and grabbed Charles by the wrist and hauled him off upstairs.  
  
Upstairs, where they now are, and into the hotel room, cursing when his key doesn’t work the first time, cursing again when it slips from overexcited fingers and hits the floor; Charles observes, sounding surprisedly delighted, “you did get me a bit drunk, congratulations,” and Erik says “what?” and Charles goes to his knees, right there in the hotel hallway, and picks up Erik’s keycard, yes, and then deliberately puts it behind his back and leans forward and tugs the zipper of Erik’s pants down with his mouth.  
  
Erik’s amazed he doesn’t spontaneously combust right there. “Charles,” he manages, panting, “fuck—you—you—key. Room key. Now.”  
  
“Yes, Erik,” Charles says demurely, and hands it over—from his knees—and grabs Erik’s hand before he can pull it back, and takes Erik’s index finger into his mouth, licking, sucking, swirling.  
  
“Fuck,” Erik says, and practically throws him through the door and onto the bed. “You—wait, you did say—” He’s going to hate himself if the answer’s no, but he can’t not ask. “You said you were—are you still—you want this, right?”  
  
Charles stops halfway through losing his shirt to blink in Erik’s direction. The blue silk frames his face, and he looks even younger, and more enchanting, than he’d seemed in the bar, eyes more wide and vivid; and Erik _is_ enchanted. No escape.  
  
“Charles,” he prompts, voice rough, not quite begging.  
  
“I’m drunk enough to offer to suck you off in the hallway,” Charles says, half flirtatiously, half seriously, “but not so drunk that I don’t know what I’m offering. Good enough?”  
  
“Christ,” Erik says, once he remembers how to breathe.   
  
Charles flings the shirt across the room. Loses his pants—and underwear, if he was even wearing any—in a single sinuous movement. Erik, watching, registers, with the clarity of intoxication, two things.  
  
First, Charles is very good at this. Elegant. Graceful. Obviously no stranger to sex, to picking men up at events, at galas, at—Erik’s stomach twists—art shows. How many times, he wonders. How many men. How many will there be after him?  
  
His stomach twists again. It, or another nearby organ, doesn’t like that idea.  
  
Second, there are freckles, yes. Scattered nearly everywhere, like cinnamon sugar over white cream, tantalizingly edible. But in some places, none. Not even the expanse of cream: old pink-silver scars, one on his elbow, one visible for a split second along his spine when he twists, stretching. A smoke-smudge of blurred flesh down one thigh.  
  
“Charles,” he says again, aware that it’s none of his business but just the other side of too drunk to care: Charles is _his_ , even if only for tonight, and he wants to know. “What happened?”  
  
Those blue eyes freeze over, and then thaw, so fast he’s not sure he’s seen the cold snap at all. “Skiing accident.”  
  
Really. “The leg?” That’s a burn scar. He knows what those look like.   
  
“Fireworks and alcohol.” Still flippant.  
  
“Elbow.”   
  
Charles’s eyes narrow. “Polo. My parents sold the whole string of ponies after. They went to live happily ever after with an heiress in Argentina. Are we done?”  
  
“Are you lying to me?”  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, sounding frustrated, “why do you care? I’m here, I’m in your bed, I’m getting more sober by the minute, and I want you to take advantage of me now, please.”  
  
“I’m not—” He stops. Rubs a hand across his face. “Don’t say that.”  
  
“What, about you taking advantage of me? It was a joke.” Charles sits up. “If anything it’s the other way around. I do know what I want, Erik.”  
  
“And you want me.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says, straightforwardly, so simply it’s disarming. “I do.”  
  
“…oh,” Erik echoes, because he can’t think of anything else to say.  
  
“Yes, oh.” Charles’s smile is crooked and hesitant and winsome. “If it helps…it might…I felt that way, too. When I saw you. Earlier tonight, standing by your sculpture…just. Oh.”  
  
“It…does help.” He steps over to the bed. Puts out a hand; catches Charles’s chin, lifts it. Charles blinks, but it’s in surprise, not rejection, and he doesn’t pull away. “You like this. Me holding you, like this…the way I was holding your arm, in the car…”  
  
Charles trembles, breathing faster.   
  
“So you do. You want…more. You want me to—what? Put you back on your knees, spank you, fuck you? All of that?” He slides his hand lower, over that vulnerable throat, not exerting any pressure, only letting the weight rest there, pointedly. He can feel that pulse, fluttering madly under his hand.  
  
“You want me to punish you, Charles? Is that what this is about?” That one earns a gasp, choked off by the tightening of fingers; he’s not cutting off Charles’s air, that’s Charles censoring himself, at the slightest twitch of Erik’s hand. “Tell me it’s not. Tell me you want me. Me, not just some random fuck at a party, Charles.”  
  
“I do,” Charles gasps, eyes enormous, pupils drinking up the black; there’s just enough pressure to make it difficult, when he swallows. And he’s hard, so hard, thick and flushed and leaking with it, stickiness smeared across that pale stomach, desire obvious when he breathes again, “I want you. Erik. I want this, and I want it from you—”  
  
It’s not a perfect answer, but it’s not a fair question. He doesn’t know why it matters so much, so damn much; it shouldn’t, but it does. It’s enough, though. Charles, saying his name.  
  
One shove, and Charles ends up in the bed, sprawling among the mound of pillows; too hard, he worries for a single heartbeat, and then one pillow gets launched airborne to the floor, and the blue eyes surface, bright and shining. “Perfect!”  
  
Since that’s the word Erik’s been wanting to use for him all night, he can’t complain without feeling like a hypocrite. That word’s uncomfortable, though. He’s never been perfect. Not good enough to save his parents, not good enough for Sebastian, not idealistic enough for the art world, not really, always feeling like a fraud any time he sold a sculpture to one of the rich and famous for enough money to pay his rent while his creation sat in a tasteless mansion…  
  
“I’m not,” he says, because he can’t say any of that to Charles, who was likely born to inherit one of said tasteless mansions. “Just. Don’t say that.”  
  
“Yes, sir.” Despite the words—again, that odd mixture of half-teasing, half-sincere, and Erik has the impression that even Charles isn’t sure which one he wants more—the tropical-ocean eyes are understanding, and not the kind of fake understanding that’s a form of pity. No. Charles is honestly listening.  
  
For some reason this both irritates him—how can this boy know him this well, this quickly?—and makes him, inexplicably, want to smile.  
  
Charles tips his head to the side. Smiles back.  
  
“God,” Erik says, involuntarily. “You’re fucking beautiful.”  
  
And Charles actually blushes.  
  
“Seriously? Of everything we’ve done…everything we’re doing… _that’s_ what embarrasses you?”  
  
“I just—” Charles drops his gaze, the pink spreading to his ears. “Sorry, sorry, I know, you only surprised me—”  
  
“You can’t tell me no one’s ever complimented you during sex before.”  
  
“Truthfully,” Charles says, laughing, self-conscious, self-deprecating, “I’ve never done this before.”  
  
Erik stops, arrested by sheer horror. He doubtless looks ludicrous, pants unfastened, one shoe on; but he can’t care. “You—you’re not a—”  
  
“No, I’m not a virgin!” Still laughing. “Hardly. I meant I’ve never been anyone’s escort, before. First time. It’s been fun.”  
  
Erik breathes, processing the first half of that statement; and then the other words catch up. “You— _you’re my escort?”_  
  
“What did you think we were doing?” Charles looks puzzled, now. “You did tell Emma you wanted someone who could handle the crowds. Who could play the part…”  
  
“You—but—” He’s finding it a bit hard to inhale. Too much tension, threatening to snap his bones. “You weren’t—you’ve been—” Pretending. Paid to be here.   
  
He’s going to have to…pay Charles to be here. For all these hours. The hours in which he’d stupidly believed that, impossibly, they’d made some sort of instant connection.  
  
“Was _any_ of this real!”  
  
“It was all real!” Charles sits up. Pulls his knees up to his chest, an oddly defensive posture. “I was—I like your art. I like you, Erik, I thought—”  
  
“Get out,” Erik snaps, and grabs his shirt from the floor and throws it at him. “Just. Go.”  
  
“But,” Charles says, and deflects the ball of fabric before it can hit him in the face. “Erik—”  
  
“Get dressed. How much do I owe you? Or do I pay Emma Frost? Is that how this works?” He hears the soft rustle of clothing, Charles sliding back into the pieces of his suit, standing up. For some reason the sound only enrages him more. As if the fabric’s rasping across his heart, inside his chest. “Tell me, Charles, what do I do if I didn’t find you satisfactory? Do I complain?”  
  
Charles doesn’t say anything, only moves to walk past him, eyes determinedly averted, and Erik grabs his wrist and shoves him up against the door, hard. Goes to set his other hand on the wood, trapping Charles between his arms; realizes his hand’s unconsciously formed into a fist, nails digging frustration into his own palm.  
  
Charles flinches.  
  
Erik freezes.  
  
It’d been a small movement. An inadvertent one.   
  
But he’s seen abuse; has seen it on the streets, in the poor neighborhoods and back alleys where he’s spent time. In Sebastian’s bed.  
  
Charles has been hurt, hit, beaten, before. Not merely once, not with the instinct this ingrained, so deeply that he can’t shut it off.  
  
Charles _is_ an escort. A prostitute, despite all the fancy words for the profession; this might be his first assignment, but something happened to make him end up here, working for Emma Frost; here, in Erik’s room.   
  
He opens his hand. Lifts it, and the other one. Steps back. Slowly. Measuredly. “I’m not going to hurt you.”  
  
Charles doesn’t move, for a second, and then nods, though his face is too pale, freckles stranded on a white-bleached shore. Whispers, inexplicably, “I’m sorry,” and then fumbles for the doorknob.  
  
“Wait—”  
  
One more small flinch; Charles is good at hiding those reactions, but Erik’s better at picking them up.  
  
“I mean it,” he says. Evenly. Clearly. “I won’t hurt you. I wasn’t—I wouldn’t. Not like that.”  
  
A hesitation, infinitesimal, but real. Hearing him.  
  
“Do you…have somewhere to go?”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“If you want,” Erik attempts, treading lightly. It’s unfamiliar ground, he senses, for them both. “You could stay. Here. And I—I’ll promise not to touch you, if you don’t want that. But…” He casts about for inspiration. “Do you…play chess? At all?”  
  
Charles stares at him.  
  
“I can teach you.” Good god. He’s all but begging the escort to stay. And it’s not even for sex.  
  
But he knows what it’s like to be hurt. And he can’t send those blue eyes out into the night, not looking like this, not when it’s his fault, however accidental.  
  
“You…” Charles draws words gradually out of the air, away from the quicksand of memory. “You’re angry with me.”  
  
At least it’s a sentence.  
  
“I was, yes.” Honesty; that’s important. “Because I thought—it doesn’t matter. Charles, even if I’m angry with you, I’m not going to hit you.” The thought burns like acid in his gut: someone, sometime, _has_ been angry and hit Charles for it. “I’m going to sit over here, okay?” On the side of the bed. Toeing off that last undiscarded shoe.   
  
“I’ll stay here, and you can…do whatever you want. But please…if you think you want to leave…at least let me give you money, or get you a hotel room, or…” He stops, because Charles is shaking his head. “You don’t want that?”  
  
“You don’t need to teach me. I mean. Chess.” Charles takes a small step away from the door. Somehow manages to look dignified, despite the paleness of his face, the loose shirt, the rumpled hair. Something about him. Unbreakable.  
  
“I don’t?”  
  
“No.” Charles picks his way across the wide expanse of the rug like a soldier traversing a minefield: frightened, resolute, committed. “Chess champion at Oxford. Four years running. I used to be nationally ranked, when I—well. Anyway, I’m out of practice, but I should be able to hold my own.” And there’s a spark returning, behind the blue: a hint of mischief, understatement, playful challenge. The real Charles, Erik thinks, for the first time; and then, surprised, wonders why he’s thought that. It’s not as if he knows the boy. Not really.  
  
He should also probably stop thinking of Charles as a boy. The—the _young man_ is twenty-two. Completely legal. Adult.  
  
“I have a set—” He starts to get up, stops himself, afraid the movement’s too abrupt. But Charles smiles like the ghost of pleasure, and perches on the end of the bed, atop piles of blanket. So Erik stands up anyway, and is somewhat reassured when there’s no corresponding twitch, this time.  
  
He fishes the travel set out of his bag—he generally has one, for trips, for working out elaborate problems and strategies, a hobby—and comes back over and sets it on the bed, halfway between them. “Black, or white?”  
  
“White.” Charles shakes hair out of his eyes, looks at him, face to face. “Erik…I am sorry. I didn’t mean to—to deceive you, or—”  
  
“It’s all right,” Erik says, and finds, to his own surprise, that he means it. As the anger’s ebbed, he’s figured out something else very important, namely the fact that Charles _is_ clever and socially connected and gorgeous and available for sex and everything Erik’s ever wanted, right here in a pocket-sized gilt-freckled package.  
  
He’s never had a particular interest in freckles before. He suspects he does now.  
  
He’ll have to give Emma a bonus, he decides. Even if they’re not having sex—though he’s not entirely ruling it out; Charles had definitely been willing, earlier—she’s pretty much found him the perfect companion. Who even plays chess.  
  
Who plays chess like a grand master, and takes Erik apart in the first few moves. The game’s not over, of course, far from it; but he’d been intentionally going a bit easy, unsure of how honest Charles had been about his skill and lack of practice, and Charles, it seems, feels as if he’s got something to prove.  
  
When Charles is thinking, absorbed by the game, he forgets to be nervous or arrogant or flirtatious or any of the multitude of other personas he’s worn in the few hours Erik’s known him. He licks his lips, not purposely seductive now, as he moves his queen, and Erik’s heart turns somersaults, absurdly.   
  
Stupid heart, having unbidden reactions. He is _not_ in love with the escort. No matter how beautiful and intelligent and complicated he is, secrets behind those eyes and those scars that Erik wants to puzzle into sense.  
  
Well. Damn.  
  
Charles wins, and looks up at him delightedly while Erik’s studying the final endgame with affronted pride. “You weren’t going easy on me, were you? Because I thought you might be, at first; but then I thought I was wrong, you’re quite good—”  
  
“Again,” Erik grumbles, half a question and half a demand; Charles raises eyebrows. “You want—a rematch?”  
  
“Of course!”  
  
“Are you…” Another little lip-lick. “Did you want me to let you win? Because I thought you’d prefer the challenge, but if—”  
  
“Absolutely not,” Erik says, forcefully. “I _like_ the challenge,” and he catches the quicksilver gleam of the answer in the depths of those eyes.  
  
And then Charles shivers.  
  
“Are you cold?”  
  
“I’m…it’s fine.”  
  
“Come here. Under the blankets.” Belatedly, he adds, “please.”  
  
Charles looks at him, and breathes in and out, deliberately, and just when Erik thinks he’s going to run, scoots over on the bed, so they’re looking at each other from amid the pillows, very close.  
  
Erik reaches out a hand and tugs blankets up over those shoulders, and Charles grabs them with one startled hand; and then tucks himself into them, a messy-haired wood sprite come out of nowhere to settle into Erik’s bed and play chess in the starlit hours of night.  
  
Erik wins the second time, but too narrowly to feel safe. The third game they play to a draw.


	3. Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles tries to sleep, and is very confused by Erik, and could probably use a hug or twenty.

Charles lies there in Erik’s bed, folded up in Erik’s long limbs, and tries to think. He’s extremely confused, which makes the process difficult.  
  
Neither of them had been holding back, that third chess game; it’d been a honest draw, an even match. He’d enjoyed it. Had realized, at some point, glancing up to see Erik’s eyes scrutinizing a bishop with determined intent, how much he’d missed a strategy played out against a master opponent.  
  
He’d thought Erik might want him again, then; had seen the same excitement flash in those winter-river eyes. He’d almost reached up to unbutton his own shirt, a question or an offer, but before he could, Erik’d spotted the time, muttered a curse in what might’ve been German, and waved at the bed. “Come on.”  
  
“…what? Sorry.”  
  
“You’re not leaving now. I’ve kept you up all night. Stay. Rest.”  
  
“You want me to—”  
  
“I want you,” Erik’d growled, absurdly fierce, and yet not absurd at all, completely committed to Charles’s safety for this night at least, “to stay here. Sleep in the bed. I won’t ask you for anything. I’ll sleep on the floor if you want me to. But stay.”  
  
Charles had opened his mouth. Closed it. Erik evidently thought, and still thinks, that he’s a prostitute, an escort, likely with no place of his own to call home.   
  
Charles in fact has no place to call home, though he does own several houses. And many antique towering  beds. It’s a semantic question, and he plays with it like picking at the loose edges of an unhealed scab, in his head: what _does_ define a home?   
  
After an indeterminate time he gives it up as unanswerable. At least for him; he’s never known, so he has no solid starting point, no strong hypothesis.  
  
Erik makes a rather impatient sound, even in his sleep, and sticks a foot between Charles’s ankles. Charles considers this, bemused. Erik the cuddler. That’s…  
  
…rather nice. Erik’s very warm, and feels good, strong and solid, wrapped around him. He sighs.  
  
Erik evidently takes this, in his sleep, as something to be worried about, because he promptly latches on tighter and pushes his nose into Charles’s hair. Okay.  
  
They’d started out stretched on opposite sides of the bed, wary demarcations of territory. Charles had been awkward not from a lack of desire to touch Erik—he certainly doesn’t mind touching Erik—but because, in point of fact, he’s never slept next to someone, only slept, without having first been fucked into utter exhaustion; and several of those times he’s woken up still tied to the bedframe or the headboard or the St Andrews cross or whatever might’ve been in use that night.   
  
New. All of it. And he’d thought nothing else, nothing left, could surprise him.  
  
Erik surprises him. Erik in the limo, in the hallway, in the bed, hand on his throat…   
  
So much raw power, in those hands. So much control. Erik ought to be, and is, or was, or had been until they’d stopped, a perfect answer for his needs, someone who could take him apart the way he has to be broken, someone who won’t care about pleas or cries or pain, who simply won’t stop, not until he’s trembling and wrecked and begging for a foot on his cock, a hand jerking his head back, a fist splitting him open from the inside, something, anything, more; and who might not stop even then…  
  
Erik had called him beautiful. Before any tears; before any sex.   
  
Erik had seen the panic, even as Charles threw up walls to hide it. Old wounds, and his defenses’re good. But Erik had seen him behind them.  
  
Erik had spoken to him cautiously, as if trying to tempt a wild frightened animal to stay, to accept food, to believe that not all hands will reach out to strike him. To accept chess, he amends. Metaphorical food.  
  
Erik had carefully considerately not touched him, both of them remaining mostly dressed, while Charles lay there and eventually faked sleep so that Erik would sleep in truth. He’s good at faking sleep. That skill had come in handy when he’d been younger, though of course it was often hard to maintain once another body actually began hitting him.  
  
He’d frightened Cain with that, once. Had simply gone limp, after the first blow to the head. Pretended his own demise. It’d been easy to do; not that far a stretch in any case, with the world spinning so sickeningly into dark. His stepbrother’d run downstairs screaming that it’d been an accident; Charles had gotten the second beating later, from his stepfather, for the pretense. At the time he’d thought Cain wasn’t the brightest; still, though, it’d been worse for him in the end, so maybe Cain’d been the smarter one after all.  
  
The downside to faking sleep is that Erik believes he _is_ asleep, which is why Erik had felt comfortable falling under as well, which is why they’re here.   
  
Here, with what seems to be every one of Erik’s limbs draped over him, octopus-like, clinging. As if afraid that Charles, if not held securely, will evaporate like fairy gold come morning.  
  
More surprises. More confusion.  
  
Erik had wanted him. He knows that; had seen it in the way those hot eyes’d studied him, avidly raking over every inch of his frame. He’d felt the stiffness in Erik’s suit trousers, the promise of size and girth and hard heat.   
  
He wants to know even more. Wants to know what that cock would feel like in his mouth, his throat, pushing into him, himself choking on it, swallowing or failing to swallow it all, sticky with need and Erik’s orgasm, spilling out of his mouth and over his chin. Wants to feel that length slide inside him, stretching him almost beyond bearing, the pain too splendid to be anything but ecstasy, when Erik takes him hard and fast and rough, on hands and knees or up against a wall or bent over the bed. Anywhere.  
  
Erik _had_ wanted him, but hadn’t asked for any of that. Had backed off, at Charles’s idiotic misplaced attack of skittishness, and hasn’t come near him again.  
  
Erik evidently respects strength. The challenge. The fight. Certainly over a chessboard. But he’s seen Charles flinch, as well. And doesn’t want him now.  
  
It’s not fair, he decides, lying there in the creeping darkness, squeezing his eyes tightly closed, until little starbursts of color swim and fade behind his lids. He’s good at sex. He’s bloody _fantastic_ at sex. Flexible, uninhibited, perfectly willing to do anything, every lurid little fantasy his partner’s ever had, and the kinkier the better, really, bring it on and brandish the whips…   
  
It’s what he’s good at. It’s what he’s good _for_.  
  
Well. That and research. Science. Academia. He misses Oxford and the intricate intellectual joys of discovery like the oceans miss the moonlight, when it all goes dark. But the Xavier Corporation needs a figurehead, now that his mother’s gone too, liver disease at last, no surprise there; and he’s got two more puzzles to solve, two more names.   
  
Only two. He’s found the rest. Made what amends he can. For some, there’s nothing he can do. Despite all his research skills.  
  
Two more. And then he can sell off the company, and burn his father’s so-called research, and pretend that no one with the Xavier name ever experimented on anyone, ever forced children through intelligence tests for days on end without food, ever strapped electrodes to the heads of the brightest of the lot to study their brains…  
  
The tiny scars, over his own temples, are near-invisible now.   
  
He wonders what he’ll do, lying there entangled in Erik’s arms in the night. He was never quite genius enough for his father, even before the messy suicide; never a man enough for Kurt, the stepfather from hell who’d nonetheless saved him, both him and Cain, from the fire in the labs, that fire of course having been deliberately set to cover up secrets; it’d succeeded in obscuring details, and also in getting rid of that stepfather, who’d just had too much lung damage to heal. Kurt had meant to rescue his own son, and had accidentally grabbed Charles first; why the man hadn’t just dropped him and traded one for the other, Charles is resigned to never understanding, and equally why his stepfather had needed on his deathbed to tell him that story.  
  
Never able to finish that PhD, he adds to the list, being called back home to deal with the family disaster. Never having that glimmering academic life of scholarly curiosity, not now. Even if he goes back, he’ll be behind. And he’s not good at not being good enough, either.  
  
He’ll just sell all the pieces of the corporation off to the first buyer and become an escort in truth, he decides, facetiously serious in the black hole of the night. He _is_ good at sex. And he’ll have enough money to be fastidious about his living arrangements, and selective about his clientele, at least for some time. By the time it runs out, he’ll have a reputation. And he can let himself be fucked for money; it doesn’t matter, that’s not degrading, not for the boy who once had a blinding orgasm rutting against the floor, licking a high-heeled boot, the other one pressed to the back of his neck as he jerked helplessly and spent himself, sobbing and shuddering, under someone else’s feet.   
  
Oddly, he hadn’t felt better after that one; but then he so rarely does, beyond the moment’s ephemeral release. Nothing ever truly changes.  
  
Maybe Erik will come see him, once in a while.  
  
Maybe they can play chess.  
  
He’d like that, he thinks.   
  
Erik probably wouldn’t, but that’s okay; this is Charles’s imagined future, and if he wants to imagine Erik in it, wistfully, once or twice, that doesn’t hurt anyone but himself, and Erik doesn’t have to know.


	4. Erik Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik is besotted and doesn't want to admit it, the morning after; also, some sex, by which I mean a lot of sex.

Erik waits five days before he goes to see Emma Frost again. He makes himself wait. He’s not craving Charles’s company _that_ badly. He’s _not_.  
  
He plays chess against his laptop computer and loses twice and gets up in the middle of the night and finds the brass and copper wires he’s been fiddling with in odd moments, never quite sure what to do with them. He’d picked them up on a whim, because he listens to his artist’s instincts, but he’d always thought they were too fragile for any of his more serious projects. They bend and twist and slide through his hands like silk.   
  
But they don’t break. And he idly loops one around itself, a twirling, dancing spiral.   
  
Charles had been asleep, when he’d awakened. He’d been surprised by that, somewhere deep down: he’d thought, once or twice, that Charles must’ve been faking, that those little rumbles and even breaths were too flawless, nobody slept the way people always thought they did…  
  
But Charles hadn’t been faking, at least in the morning. No actor could’ve pulled off that complete and total shock.  
  
“Erik…”  
  
“Yes?” He’d been lying there awake for a few minutes by that point, one arm draped over Charles’s waist, just watching the rise and fall of that chest as he breathed. Charles didn’t relax, not even in sleep; those expressive eyebrows were pulled tight, as if to ward off a headache, or memories, or pain.  
  
“Erik?”  
  
“Still me. Do you feel like breakfast?”  
  
Charles had lain there and stared at him. “I…fell asleep.”  
  
“People generally do. Especially at night. How’s your head?”  
  
“Fine…I don’t…I hardly ever get hangovers…Erik.”  
  
“Really yes,” he’d said, and stretched a leg over Charles too, for extra weight, for certainty. Charles had gasped, softly. Tried to part his thighs, for Erik’s knee to fit between them. “You—”  
  
Erik bit his lip, hard, said, “No,” even though he wanted to say yes, and then Charles had looked at him with such unhappy eyes, wide and uncomprehending and rejected…  
  
He’d given in.  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“Yes—” Something like desperation, in that voice. Crumbling around the edges of the tea and scones. The unspoken understood please.  
  
He’d taken a breath. Then one more. “Strip.”  
  
And those eyes had lit up, so quickly Erik felt a bit uneasy. As if this, being commanded, following orders, was what Charles considered familiar stable ground.  
  
The clothing went flying; Charles sat on the bed and looked at him, waiting.  
  
Erik had considered this. Slid his hand into his own pants, casually flicking them open, drawing himself out. He was already hard, had been since waking up, his body remembering the way Charles felt, tasted, sounded. Charles breathed in, audible and a bit disappointed.  
  
“You wanted to do this?” He ran his hand over his own cock, deliberately. Making Charles watch. His skin tingled. Crackled. Something about the hungry way blue eyes followed his hand. “You wanted to come here, and kneel down for me, and touch me when I tell you to, taking off my clothes?”  
  
A whimper, obviously unplanned, because Charles himself seemed surprised to hear it. “Erik…”  
  
“You don’t get to set the rules, Charles. If you want something, you need to ask me for it. And I might say yes. If I feel like indulging you.” Was that his voice, saying those words, stern and smoky with command? He’d never imagined this, not ever, had never known he could want anything like this; but Charles was looking at him as if unexpectedly presented with the secret of the universe, and he wanted more of that look. He wanted _more_.  
  
Charles needed this, he thought. Remembered that wordless expression from moments ago, a knife of unanticipated cruelty wielded by someone Charles had played chess against, someone he might’ve almost called a friend.   
  
He couldn’t take the injury away—he suspected the real wound was far deeper, and older, than he could see—but he could try to stop the bleeding.  
  
He crooked one finger, beckoning. Charles paused for a single second, visibly flipping through possibilities, then stretched out across the bed on his stomach, lips inches from Erik’s cock, where it jutted from his open pants.   
  
He was still dressed. Charles wasn’t. This would work, he decided.  
  
He put a hand on Charles’s head. “Mouth. Get me off. Like this.”  
  
Charles gasped, a response that went straight to the base of Erik’s spine and pooled there, insistent and hot; breathed, “Yes, sir,” and opened his mouth and took that rigid length in one fluid motion, graceful and astonishing and practiced and so thrillingly erotic that Erik forgot his next inhale.  
  
His cock. Charles taking all of him. He knew he wasn’t small—was in fact the opposite of small—but Charles hadn’t blinked at the sight, the size. No discomfort revealed.  
  
He did slide back up, briefly, to breathe, to reposition his head and shoulders, a better angle; “wait,” Erik told him, “slowly,” and Charles didn’t answer, but did as commanded, lips wet and stretched as they moved lower, wrapped obscenely around his shaft, torturously unhurried now.  
  
All the way to the base, lips and face pressed into the tangle of wiry hair; he had to be filling Charles’s elegant throat, he thought, so deep, and couldn’t hold back the shove upward at the thought. Charles moaned around his cock, and Erik nearly lost it on the spot.   
  
He dug fingernails into his palm. Self-control. Then put his hand into all that curling hair. Held Charles down. Thrust again, purposefully.  
  
And _there_ was the discomfort, Charles’s throat fluttering around his cock, body resisting; Erik used the hair to tug his head up, letting him breathe, and glanced at his eyes.   
  
All that blue had gone dark, dreamy with arousal; amazement, also, hovering weightlessly around the corners like buoyant clouds. Charles, perhaps, hadn’t expected the forcefulness, or hadn’t expected it so soon. But there was also real pleasure, in the upward curve of those lips, in the depths beneath ocean tides: he could see it even before Charles noticed he was looking, and then Charles did notice, and smiled.  
  
It might’ve been a stage-smile, an act for the customer. But somehow he didn’t think so. He thought it was real.  
  
“More?” he inquired, and was surprised when his own voice came out as a whisper. Charles nodded, lips brushing the line of his cock, and then licked him, one playful sweep of tongue from base to tip, evidently of his own volition.  
  
“Good,” Erik said, because he didn’t have words for all that he felt, right then. And he coiled the hand into the beguiling hair, and shoved Charles’s head down again, setting the pace, keeping that splendid mouth right where he wanted it, while Charles licked him and sucked at him and let out little broken moans when Erik let him and relaxed into the physical command, relinquishing any last shards of control.  
  
“So fucking beautiful,” Erik told him, the next time he permitted Charles to come up for air, tears glistening now in those sea-storm eyes. “You are.” Charles shivered, head to toe; lowered eyelashes like wet cinders, dark and spiked together.  
  
“No. Look up. Look at me.” That one seemed difficult; Charles trembled again, more continuously, obeying. Erik swallowed, hard; took the hand out of his hair, trailed it over one cheek, stroking away escaped liquid-crystal tracks. Promised him, soft-voiced, “you’re all right,” and Charles breathed out, almost a sob, eyes enormous and off-balance and heartbreakingly full of need, and let Erik’s cock slip free of his mouth, and then nuzzled into the length, letting it rub along his face, his lips, that other freckled cheek. The tip left streaks of wetness, stickiness, smearing over that soft skin.  
  
Erik ran his free hand down Charles’s exposed back, following the arrow of his spine. There was indeed a scar there, a permanent pink-white memento; he didn’t ask, not now, but the sight did cool his need a fraction; a good thing, too.   
  
“Do you want me,” he murmured, as Charles breathed and mouthed and licked along his shaft, apparently random touches, simply what felt good to him, “to come like this? Over your face, Charles? On you?”  
  
A moan, a shudder, and those hips jerked forward into the mattress; Erik nearly laughed. “So, yes, then.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles whispered, “yes, Erik, yes, please—” and then stopped, eyes and voice astounded. “Erik, I—”  
  
“What is it?” He set that hand on the curve of Charles’s luscious backside, contemplating. “Everything all right?”  
  
“You…asked.” Charles sounded a bit dazed. Erik couldn’t really blame him.  
  
“I asked about what?”  
  
“Me…”  
  
Erik shook his head, mentally; said, “And you didn’t answer me. Charles, are you all right? I need to know, before I spank you.”  
  
“…oh god,” Charles said, and dropped his head to rest on Erik’s thigh, panting. “Yes, please.”  
  
“Yes what? And that’s why the spanking, you know. In case you were wondering.” He kneaded that delicious muscle, nudged those legs further apart, tapped fingers over sensitive skin. “You need to be clear. When you answer my questions. Yes, you’re all right; yes, you want me to spank you; or both?”  
  
“…both.” Into his leg, a heated wisp of breath. “Please.”  
  
“Good,” Erik told him, “and I didn’t say you could stop getting me off, either; mouth, Charles,” and then, more quietly, “only if you want to.”  
  
And Charles tipped his head to one side, to meet Erik’s gaze. He was smiling, a tiny private kind of wondering smile. “I want to.”  
  
“Then go on.” With his hand back on Charles’s head, holding him down; with his other hand snapping down over those tantalizing curves, firm and loud.  
  
Charles gasped, around his cock. “Shh,” Erik told him, and held him in place, and did it again, and again, while Charles moaned, while all that ginger-and-cream skin turned pink and warm and then red and hot to his hand.   
  
His handprints. On Charles’s skin.  
  
Charles was actually crying now, face wet and flushed from the exertion, from the lack of air, but he’d valiantly continued trying to lick, to stroke, to suck at Erik’s cock, buried in his throat. “Knees,” Erik said, and watched him push himself up, shaking.   
  
He slipped his hand under that slim body. Found the desire there, gorgeously aroused, straining with it, dripping messily, so hard he must be in agony, craving release. When he closed his hand around the shaft, Charles groaned, a low animal noise, and pushed forward into his hand.  
  
“You want to come, don’t you?” He rubbed his thumb over that slit, drawing out more moisture. “You could have come like that. From me spanking you; couldn’t you, Charles? All over the bed, everywhere, just from my hand…or from sucking my cock…or both at once…you like that, me spanking you with my cock in your mouth? Tell me.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Charles managed, voice like raw velvet from all the unrelenting use of his throat.   
  
“Do you want me to let you come, Charles?” He held his breath, waiting. It was a difficult question; Charles might be too far under to answer honestly, might only sob his name and the _anything you want, please…_  
  
Charles might also be far enough under to be truthful, unable to say anything other than the instant emotional response.  
  
A question, he thought, and waited.  
  
And Charles whispered, lovely accent fraying and tattered, watermarks shredding the satin, “Yes.”  
  
“Then you can,” Erik told him, and pushed his head back down, and brought the hand cracking down over his backside one more time, and Charles shuddered everywhere and sucked hard on Erik’s cock and shook with the force of it, as the climax hit.  
  
One heartbeat, two, a second to recover; and he pushed Charles up and over onto his back on the bed—Charles went willingly, exhaustedly, collapsing among the pillows with bliss-drenched eyes, barely aware—and knelt over him, cock inches from his lips; Charles moved, vaguely, to sit up and lick at him, as if that might be expected. “Don’t,” Erik said, because he wanted to remember this, Charles just like this, and wrapped his hand around his own cock and jerked rapidly, once, twice, and came, a full-body crash of incandescence, white heat splashing over Charles’s upturned face.  
  
It caught in his eyelashes. Streaked the bridge of his nose. Painted all the freckles. “Charles—” Erik said, and fell down next to him in the pillows, and grabbed him, and held him close, feeling all the tiny uncontrolled tremors as if they were his own.  
  
After a while, one tentative arm crept around his waist, in reply.  
  
He’d gotten Charles up and into the shower, eventually. Had ignored the protesting murmur of complaint. Charles needed to be cleaned up and caressed by hot water and kept from being sore, if that could be a possibility, and then held by Erik some more, which was a certainty.  
  
Charles might need to leave. Might have another appointment. Would definitely at some point have to return to Emma Frost.  
  
He didn’t want Charles to leave. Didn’t want Charles to have another appointment.   
  
He’d been Charles’s _first_ appointment. He wanted that word to be _only_.  
  
The want had shocked him, with the force of it.  
  
Charles had nearly been asleep on his feet in the shower, eyes soft and hazy, mouth loose when he pressed a kiss into Erik’s shoulder. There was something incredulous in that kiss, as if he’d not been expecting to make the gesture, and Erik had walked him back out to the bed and tucked them both in, over on the far side, avoiding the wet spots. Charles had fallen asleep again almost instantly, eyelashes lying over weary skin, lips slightly parted, looking sweet and innocent and shower-clean, trusting and guileless; this was a lie, and Erik knew it—Charles’d already deceived him once, however not on purpose that’d been—but he couldn’t help tightening his hold anyway.  
  
They’d awakened for the second time at mid-afternoon, the sun slanting goldenly through the half-closed curtains. Charles had gasped, sat up, stared wildly around. “I have to—I didn’t mean to—I have a—”  
  
“Another appointment?” Right. Of course.  
  
“No—well, yes, but not—I have an actual meeting with—never mind—” Charles swung legs out of bed, started gathering clothes, paused to touch the travel chessboard, remaining helpfully on the bedside table. “Erik.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik’d said right back, smiling, even though Charles was preparing to go, even though Charles was getting dressed. That voice, saying his name, and he felt like a smile. For no reason at all. “Can I…would you…”   
  
Charles finished buttoning his shirt. Put a hand on the doorknob. “Erik…I would like to…I’d like to see you again. If you—I mean. If you wanted.” And then, very quickly, out the door, without even waiting for an answer; Erik’d run across the room, once he’d stopped being paralyzed by the words, but Charles was already out of sight, and he remained too naked to follow.  
  
He’d shut the door. And then leaned against it, and then, very slowly, slid down it to sit on the floor.   
  
Charles. God. _Charles_.  
  
He sits there now, legs bent in front of him, and thinks, but wait I don’t even know how to find you, and then thinks, oh, that’s a yes, then, and then stares hard at the bland beige hotel carpet until it blurs beneath his eyes.  
  
He can contact Emma Frost, of course. Charles likely knows that; and Charles no doubt doesn’t have a personal phone or contact information, or isn’t allowed to give that to clients, or something, some reason he’d not’ve given it to Erik.  
  
He can call Emma Frost right now if he wants to. Can walk across the room, still naked, and demand to have Charles again tonight.  
  
He sits there, with the uncaring carpet, and the thick plank of the door at his back.  
  
He’s…not afraid, no…only reluctant. That’s a better word. More rational. He’s not wanted anyone this badly since Sebastian, since he’d been the virgin in the bed and in the studio, so flattered when Sebastian said he showed promise, so excited when Sebastian wanted to include a piece of his in the next exhibition…  
  
So confused, feeling a sick sense of violation, something precious stolen from him, when Sebastian’d exhibited the sculpture under his own name, not Erik’s.   
  
He’d laughed, when Erik’d confronted him: “but you have no reputation, pet, and I do; and anyway I’m giving you a home, providing for your mother’s medical care…what’s yours is mine, Erik. Understand?”  
  
He had.   
  
He’d not left Sebastian then. Not then. That’d come later, for other reasons. And there’d been no one else since, no one with the power to reach into his heart and twist it open and watch it crack, blood running like water out onto the ground.  
  
Sebastian emails him, from time to time. The last had been three weeks ago: _you’re doing well for yourself, aren’t you, pet? Perhaps I’ll drop by to see you and chat about old times._  
  
He’d deleted it, unanswered.   
  
He’d previously changed his email, his mobile number, as frequently as he could. But he’s relatively successful these days, and he needs a way for people to contact him. Sebastian knows this. Has always found him, anyway.   
  
Erik’s given up on hiding. It’s not as if Sebastian can do anything worse to him.  
  
Charles, though, Charles is dangerous. Charles is a paradoxical tangle of fragility and strength, a lock with an unknown configuration of key, a shape Erik can almost visualize, old-fashioned and sturdy and graceful, woven of bronzed metal with many twisting tumblers inside. He’s shaping the sculpture in his head, even now, without thinking.  
  
Charles _is_ dangerous. Charles makes him lose focus. Lose clarity. Lose independence. Charles needs him, and Erik doesn’t want to be needed by anyone; neither does he want to need anyone, and when he closes his eyes he sees an ocean-bright gaze considering, thoughtfully, a chessboard.  
  
He stares at his hands. He’s not calling Emma Frost. He’s had the best night of his life, and that’s good, that’s great, he’ll always have that memory. He doesn’t need any more complications.   
  
His fingers hum with the memory of freckled skin.  
  
He will, of course, send her the money. And more: something for Charles, something he can do for Charles.  
  
She might not pass it along to Charles.  
  
He doesn’t know how else to find Charles.  
  
He could make an appointment to pay her in person. He might see Charles there.  
  
He might see Charles again.  
  
Charles is an escort, he thinks. Sees men and women for money.   
  
He wants no one else to see Charles, and he wants to see Charles, the next night, the night after, right fucking now.  
  
A week, he tells himself. He can wait a week. That’s not too needy. Seven days is surely long enough to establish his lack of dependence.   
  
He sits there on the carpet, thinking, a week. Seven days. Counting today. So really only six. Six days.  
  
The hotel bed, triumphant in all its despoiled glory, smirks at him.  
  
There’s a fallen pillow conveniently beside his hand. The one Charles’d launched, that very first time. He throws it at the too-smug furniture, and gets up, and thinks, Charles.


	5. Erik And Charles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik and Charles have a phone conversation, Emma gets slightly exasperated, and we get a bit more Charles backstory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More probably Monday! There will be sex. Oh yes. Erik has plans.

Erik gives in and makes the appointment a day early in the end. _Five_ days is almost a week, right? Closer than not, anyway. If one rounds up.  
  
Frost Services is located in a discreet and tasteful building that’d not be out of place amid executive offices, where it in fact is. The cool grey walls leer at him, as he walks in.  
  
The pixie-faced girl at the front desk sends him in to see Emma Frost right away; he’s a few minutes early, because he’d been walking faster than usual, because…because he had been. That’s all.  
  
Her office is all white. Colorless. As an artist, he finds this disconcerting. Craves textures, brushed metals, swooping shades of bronze and copper and iron and gold. Aged browns. Creams. Perhaps even some blue.  
  
Emma Frost doesn’t bother to get up, though she does wave him to a chair; he places the balance of the money on her desk, first, in overt defiance of the discreet architecture. The walls do not approve. The woman doesn’t turn a perfectly coiffed hair.  
  
“So.” She regards him dispassionately. “I assume that everything was…to your liking?”  
  
“I want to see Charles again.”  
  
Emma Frost looks unsurprised by this. “Clients often do. Does he want to see you?”  
  
It’s an unexpected question; she’s a businesswoman and Charles is an escort, and from everything he’s heard about Frost, she’s not the type to be overly attached to her employees. Still, he has an answer, and he likes the fact that she’s asking.  
  
“He said so.”  
  
“Did he.” Even more skeptical.  
  
“Yes,” Erik snaps, “he did. We played chess, and we talked, and as he was leaving he told me he’d like to see me another time. Is that enough, or do you want to call him in and interrogate him too?”  
  
“You…played chess.” Now she’s giving him an extremely odd look. “Charles doesn’t play.”  
  
“I can assure you that he does.” Where on earth is this conversation going?  
  
“He doesn’t—never mind.” She scribbles something on the paper in front of her. “Mr Lehnsherr…I can’t tell you certain information. Knowledge is power, after all. And I do so enjoy power. But…Charles is special. Not generally available to the common clientele. Do you understand?”  
  
Not entirely; but of course Charles is special. Erik had known that within seconds of laying eyes on him.   
  
Does Charles have an exclusive client list, perhaps? But—no, because Charles had called Erik his first. His first at this particular type of engagement, at least. That tea-and-crumpets accent dances through his memory again: _I’ve actually never done this before…been an escort, I mean…_  
  
“I want him,” he says again. “I’ll pay for his time. Anything. Name your price.”  
  
“Oh, sugar,” Emma says, smiling sweet and cold as her service’s name, “that’s a dangerous offer.”  
  
“I can afford it.” He stands. He’s taller than she is; uses it to advantage. “I’ve sold quite a few pieces lately.” More than a few, in fact. And many of those at last week’s exhibition, and after. Charles, again. Magic.  
  
“One more thing. Exclusivity.”  
  
Now Emma Frost looks genuinely taken aback. “You want—”  
  
“I want him all to myself. No one else. No other appointments. I told you I’d pay. I meant it.”  
  
“Sugar,” Emma says, shaking her head. “That one you’re going to have to work out with Charles. I don’t set his schedule, and as much as I’d love to take _all_ your hard-earned money, it wouldn’t be right.”  
  
“Who _does_ set his schedule?”  
  
“Charles himself.” Her eyes assess his reaction. “He didn’t tell you that.”  
  
“He didn’t—” He stops. She doesn’t need to know. Doesn’t need to hear about the way Charles had vanished, so swiftly, as if chased out the door by his own admission. “He said he had another appointment—a meeting. He had to go.”  
  
“A meeting…” Frost pauses. Jots something else down; studies it. “Not an appointment. I can tell you that.”  
  
“He’s not seeing anyone else?”  
  
“Not that I know of. But, as I said, Charles sets his own schedule. And he doesn’t tell me everything.” She stands, as well. “When are you free next? This Friday?”  
  
Tonight. Tomorrow night. Whenever Charles is free. “…fine.”  
  
“Wait here,” she says, picking up her phone, and disappears through a back door.  
  
  
  
Charles has just locked the front door when his mobile phone rings, in his pocket.  
  
He sighs, fishes it out, glances at the screen. “Emma? Is this another one of your emergency clients? Because I’m busy at the moment, but I can be there in a couple of hours if you need me.” It’s happened before, on occasion; clients who come in with extremely specialized demands, requests that Emma’s regular staff can’t or won’t supply. Emma Frost takes pride in giving her visitors what they want; Charles can take whatever they happen to want. He and Emma both win.  
  
“It’s Erik Lehnsherr. Your artist.”  
  
And for a second Charles can’t breathe.  
  
He sits down, abruptly, on the top step. Feels hot and cold, all at once.  
  
Erik. _Erik_. God.  
  
He’d asked Erik—begged Erik, really—to ask for him again. Had realized while fleeing from his own desperation that he’d never actually given Erik his number, or in fact disabused the man of the notion that he works for Emma Frost.  
  
He’s _never_ come like that, so deeply and so fast and so profound, with anyone, for anyone, head to toe shivering with white-hot ecstasy. He’s certainly never slept in anyone’s arms, after, too exhausted to fight tiredness, unable to do anything other than surrender and be made vulnerable.   
  
Erik had held him, for hours, and had not moved, not disturbed him at all.  
  
The world’s busy not-quite-raining, beyond his isolated little step. So much mist. It shrouds details. Hides sharp edges in deceptive cloud.  
  
Emma’s talking, in his ear. “…and he wants to see you Friday.”  
  
“…Friday?”  
  
“Weren’t you listening?” She huffs out an impatient breath. “He’s in my office. Right now. He wants to see you on Friday. Are you available?”  
  
“I’m,” Charles says. “Yes.”  
  
“When?”  
  
“I…any time. All day. Emma…”  
  
“Don’t thank me. I’m the one getting paid. Charles, are you sure—”  
  
“Yes. Give it to—” His mind blanks, for a second. Whose turn is it, out of Emma’s actual employees, to get a bonus from his earnings?  
  
“Angel?”  
  
“Fine. Yes. Thank you.”  
  
“Charles…” She sighs. “Don’t. I said. Listen…he said that you asked for him. That you told him you wanted to see him again. Was that true?”  
  
He nods, even though she can’t see it. “I did. I do.”  
  
There’s a pause. “Do I need to come check you over? Whip marks, cuts, branding?”  
  
“Good god, Emma. No.”  
  
“None of that?”  
  
“When have I _ever_ let anyone near me with a red-hot piece of metal?”  
  
“There’s a first time for everything. You really did ask to see him again?”  
  
“We played chess,” Charles says, and suddenly finds himself rubbing a hand across his eyes, shaky, even though he’s still sitting down. “He—I kissed him. In the shower.”  
  
He can picture her staring at her phone, given that garbled statement. It takes a lot to silence Emma Frost. He’s rather proud.  
  
“Charles,” she says, finally, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”  
  
He has to laugh. “So do I.”  
  
“Do you want me to send him to a hotel, or—”  
  
“Tell him…” He’s feeling reckless, and giddy, and alive with it, all at once. Erik wants him. Wants to see him. “Can I…talk to him?”  
  
 _“What?”_  
  
“Please.”  
  
“What _is_ it about this one,” Emma says, “is he divinely well-endowed, or fantastic with his hands, or what, tell me, because it can’t be his charming manners. He’s probably scowling at the door at this precise moment. And you’re worrying me, and I don’t like to be worried, Charles.”  
  
“Can I talk to him?”  
  
She blows out an explosive breath; but he hears the click of her shoes, the swing of the door, the murmur: “Mr Lehnsherr? Charles. For you.”  
  
And then Erik’s voice. Smooth and soft and faintly accented, a rush of sensory memory that makes his head spin. “Charles? Are you—is everything—”  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, smiling loopily, sitting there on his step with the mist-tendrils for company. “Friday?”  
  
“Friday—yes—what time? Where should I—”  
  
“Any time. I’ll…” He takes a deep breath. “I’ll be home all day.” And then he gives Erik his address. His real one.  
  
He can hear Emma, in the background, gasp out loud.  
  
Erik doesn’t bat an eye, or doesn’t recognize the address. “I’ll find it. Is there anything I should—bring, or—”  
  
“Just yourself. I have things. I mean. Some things.” He stops. Backtracks. “Unless there’s anything you want. In particular.”  
  
Erik’s voice sounds fond, echoing his words. “Just yourself.”  
  
“All right. Friday. I have to—I have to go. But. I’ll see you then.”  
  
“Friday.”  
  
“Fri—Right. Yes.”  
  
“Get the fuck off my phone, you two.”  
  
“Sorry, Emma.”  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
“I’m not, either.”  
  
“Charles, don’t you have somewhere to be?”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“I’m hanging up for you,” Emma says, and takes the phone away to the sound of Erik saying “Charles, do you want me to pick up any—” and he hears Emma snap “Oh for heaven’s sake,” and the call cuts off.  
  
Any what, he wonders, and his first impulse is to hit redial, but Emma won’t thank him, and this way Erik can surprise him. Again.  
  
He checks his watch, says, “Damn!” out loud to the mist, and dashes through the clinging damp to his car, which is parked outside because the sleek smug classic hulks are busy colluding in the garage and no doubt mocking his old battered secondhand model, which he’d bought for himself, not touching the family funds.  
  
He finds his way to the run-down single-room free clinic with no trouble. The directions he’s been given are quite good; Moira, his contact at the FBI, has excellent sources.  
  
He’s greeted at the door by the exact young doctor he’s looking for, and they regard each other for a moment in mutual consternation. “You’re a bit different from most of my patients,” Henry McCoy observes, with some wariness.   
  
Charles understands. The Xavier name. It has a certain meaning, to the survivors.  
  
“You weren’t easy to find,” he offers, because it’s true. His father’d used code names on all their files. Charles himself had been the Professor, a not-very-funny joke about certain expectations; but then, none of them had been funny, all with what he recognizes now as a line of cruelty down the center. Havok for the angry older Summers boy, who’d fought back. Cyclops for his younger brother, more intellectual and therefore more of a favorite, with his eyesight forever impaired by one of the early tests gone wrong. The girl named Storm, the one he’d tracked down last week, now living in Africa; she’d refused his offer of money on her own behalf, but took it to help her village.  
  
Henry McCoy had been Beast. Charles wonders why; he can’t imagine a less bestial visage.   
  
Maybe that’s why. It would’ve been like his father.  
  
“I didn’t want to be found.” McCoy glances around. “Especially not—no offense—by your family.”  
  
“My family,” Charles sighs, “is unfortunately very good at offense. I know why you were hard to find. And I don’t want anything from you.”  
  
“What, then?” A wave at the pristine space, small and obviously cobbled together but with pride, every instrument shining. “I’m a doctor, Mr Xavier. I help people. Children. And I don’t know you.” I knew your father, those tense shoulders say. Too well.  
  
“You do help people,” Charles points out. “So let me help you. I can—”  
  
“Are you offering money?” McCoy glares; and perhaps there is a beast-like temper in there after all. “Buying me off? For silence, is that it?”  
  
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Charles says, suddenly irritated, though he does understand. But he’s _not_ his father. “No.”  
  
“Then what do you want?”  
  
“To contribute to your cause.” He opens his hands. “I’m selling the company. Burning the files. So no one else can find you. And I have a lot of money, and I’d like to give you some of it. No strings. All right?”  
  
“To make yourself feel better?” Suspicious; well, no one ever said life would be easy, Charles reflects, philosophically, and pushes his hair back from his face.  
  
Henry McCoy’s eyes go right to his temples, to the so-faint scars, and stay there.  
  
“Right,” Charles says, and runs the hand through his hair, rumpling it up again, “so, my father’s dead, my stepfather died in a fire, my mother killed herself slowly with a liquor cabinet, and my stepbrother’s off being a moron on some American football team, and will you please let me do something to help, or do I have to make an anonymous charitable donation to your clinic?”  
  
“He…experimented on you.” McCoy’s continued to stare at him. “His own son.”  
  
Charles can’t not laugh. “You knew him; you honestly think that mattered?”  
  
“No…I suppose not.” McCoy starts to reach out, as if to clasp his shoulder, touch his arm; then seems to think better of the gesture. “Drink?”  
  
“Oh god yes,” Charles says. “Please.”  
  
Two hours and several glasses of fairly decent scotch later, they’ve become, if not friends, something like allies. McCoy opens up readily now, as if sharing scars equates to an unbreakable bond; Charles himself must be too cynical for that, because all he can think is that McCoy is far too trusting a person. It’s a good thing he’s genuinely being honest about why he’s here; if he’d wanted to, he could’ve been talking Henry—“Call me Hank”—into anything.  
  
Hank accepts a generous check, on behalf of the clinic; watches Charles inspect a microscope, a centrifuge, the dog-eared stack of medical journals. “I’ll pay for your subscriptions,” Charles tells him, and a multitude of expressions crosses that friendly face: struggling pride, awareness of need, acceptance, and, at the end, an odd kind of pity.  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“Did you—what do you do? You can’t just—I mean, your mother only died last—you’ve been—” Hank trips over words, fumbles, stops.  
  
“I went to Oxford.” With purposeful vagueness. “Genetics. Anything else you need? Basic supplies, children’s toys, lollipops, all that?”  
  
“You didn’t answer the question.” And, for fuck’s sake, what is it with people reading past his walls lately? He used to be better at deflection.   
  
“No,” he says, “I didn’t.”  
  
“Then what—”  
  
“I fuck Emma Frost’s most sadistic clients for money I don’t need.” Barefaced and truthful and, consequently, safely unbelievable; Hank’s mouth falls open, and then after a second he gives a small nervous laugh. “Okay…I get it. You don’t have to tell me. And…thank you.”  
  
“The least I can do.” Charles shrugs. “You don’t know where a girl named Cassandra might be, do you?”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“She’s the last one. That’s all I’ve got to go on. Only one name.”  
  
“Doesn’t sound familiar…” Hank puts a hand on his arm, as Charles fishes for his keys. “Are you all right to drive?”  
  
“Me? You don’t get the celebrity gossip columns out here, then.”  
  
“I do, actually. I even have the internet. It’s not entirely the backside of the world.” Hank’s looking at him with concern. “I should’ve fed you something…”  
  
“Hank,” Charles says, and gently takes the hand off his arm, “I’m fine. Go save some children. Let me know if you need anything. All right?”  
  
Hank stands outside the clinic door and watches him go. Charles, thoroughly done with people wanting to take care of him, Hank and Emma and all the misplaced concern, drives faster than he should and narrowly avoids two accidents and gets caught in the cloudburst when the skies finally open up as he runs from the car to his front door.  
  
He’s got the beginnings of a vicious headache, from the alcohol, the exasperation, the lack of food, the joys of showing off his scars; he wants to be fucked, and hard, put on his knees and kept there by someone who doesn’t think that he’s fragile, who knows what he can take, who will push him over that pleasurable painful edge and not try to fix him, who might think he’s…  
  
…beautiful. Erik. _Fuck_.  
  
He looks at his mobile phone, as he throws it onto the kitchen table.   
  
Emma had personally taken his appointments three times, and once more, a month later; and then she’d stopped. Too desperate, she’d said, bluntly. “I’m sorry, Charles. You need too much.”  
  
He’d not argued, then. He’d known, and knows, it’s true.  
  
He doesn’t call Emma. He doesn’t ask for Erik’s number.  
  
Friday. He can wait. He can make himself wait. He'll be all right. He's good at that, too.  
  
He finds the legendary cavernous liquor cabinet, picks out something green that tastes like fire and licorice and is almost certainly invaluable, and ends up passing out on the uncomfortable formal sofa, with wet hair, fully dressed except for his kicked-off shoes.


	6. Erik, Coming Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik arrives to see Charles, and we very much earn that rating. Also some confessions and cuddling and pineapple pizza and a toothbrush.

It’s raining when he arrives at the specified address. The one Charles gave him, over the phone.  
  
Driving up, he’d thought he must’ve made some mistake, scribbled the numbers down wrong. But he knows he hasn’t.  
  
The houses get bigger and bigger and further and further apart, modern feudal mansions, each with their own sprawling demesne. They study his advance as if they’re preparing to pull out the flyswatter. Who _is_ this person in jeans and a leather jacket—in his defense, both stylish, or so he’s been told—with a broken windshield wiper on his car?  
  
They probably know he’s once been arrested, has had his years of shouting at equal rights rallies, his angry punk rebellion stage, his disgust for the parasites of society. He’s not that angry anymore—it’s been burned out of him, like cooling ashes, with time and the understanding that the side he’d thought he’d been on had changed around him, or maybe never been what he’d believed—but the evidence is still out there. And he’s not ashamed. He did believe it, once.  
  
He wonders what Charles would think, would have thought, of him, then. And then he realizes that Charles, who had recognized him first at the exhibition, probably knows it all. Everything about him.  
  
Or possibly not. Charles works for Emma Frost, in some strange untraditional fashion; Charles might only have seen his photo, enough to find him in a crowd.  
  
Somehow Erik doesn’t think so, though. Even if that were the case, he can’t see Charles sitting tamely back and not looking up every scrap of information on his new client. His _first_ client.  
  
The houses aren’t even visible from the broadly curving road, at this point. How and why does Charles have a place out here? A gift? An inheritance? Why not sell it, instead of selling his body?  
  
Too many questions. He wants to answer them all; doesn’t want to hear the answers, because that would mean admitting he cares what they are.  
  
He steers the car down the indicated lane, and then the mansion looms up out of the thunderclouds and steals his breath away.  
  
Might be the thunder. Or the lightning. Or the rows of windows, the swooping stone balconies that cry out for odd gargoyle faces, or the forbidding face of the expansive front steps, where the light, if there is one, appears to be out.  
  
After a second he remembers to breathe, remembers that it’s just a house, that he’s being fucking melodramatic, that Charles is somewhere inside and more likely than not starting to wonder whether Erik’s in fact coming, because the rain’s slowed traffic to a crawl and getting out of the city’d been hell.  
  
He’s not sure where to park, but there’s an incongruous secondhand compact car skewed off to one side, so he puts his own beside it, albeit more neatly. Charles’s possession? If it is, then their cars will be side by side in the storm; he chooses not to push the metaphor, and it’s certainly his imagination that his own car lets out what resembles a happy purr as he switches it off.  
  
He grabs the box from the passenger seat, and sprints through the downpour.  
  
Given the size of the place, he’s not surprised when Charles doesn’t instantly open the door at his knock, though something in his chest gives an unhappy small quiver, and then is silenced. It’s fine. He doesn’t care. He’s just here to fuck Charles again. And maybe play chess. And hold all the freckles while they sleep, because they could use the rest, because someone should, because he thinks that maybe Charles doesn’t sleep well, but did sleep, that day, in his arms.  
  
“What the _hell_ ,” he says, to his chest and the bizarre warm feeling in it, while the rain splashes down; and of course this is the moment that Charles chooses to open the door.  
  
“What?”  
  
“What? Oh—sorry, I was…talking. To myself. Sorry.”  
  
“No, I’m sorry, I was upstairs, I was—I should’ve been waiting, I’m sorry, Erik.” Charles runs a hand through his hair. He looks different, indefinably. He’s wearing jeans that fit him in all the right places and a grandfatherly cardigan, far too old for him and slightly too large, and he’s slim and sturdy under all the fluff, and Erik wants to peel him out of those layers, slowly.  
  
There’s a smudge of dust on his cheek, coating freckles. Something tired in his eyes.  
  
“Here,” he says, in case it’ll make those endless oceans smile, and holds out his offering.  
  
Charles tips his head to the side, taking it, tiredness shifting into entertained curiosity. “You didn’t have to bring anything. And come inside, please; it’s pouring out there. Cats and dogs. Big ones. Leopards and huskies.”  
  
“Doberman pinschers,” Erik says, and follows him in, through the ornate entryway, past a number of silent sheet-draped echoing caves, to the one room that feels as if somebody might actually live there, namely the kitchen.  
  
There’re take-out containers in the trash. Charles either can’t or doesn’t bother to cook, but at least he’s eating.  
  
“You really didn’t have to,” Charles says, but his hands say other things: they’re opening the hasty wrapping job as he speaks. “You aren’t—oh, _Erik_.”  
  
“You asked me if I had champagne, that first night.” It’s good champagne, too. “So we do.”  
  
“I,” Charles declares, “am opening this,” and promptly hops up on one of the counters to retrieve two crystalline flutes. Erik openly stares, because Charles being too short for his own kitchen is unbearably adorable.  
  
The cork comes out with a loud pop, and Charles pours, quick and refined, and hands him a glass. “We should make some sort of toast.”  
  
“To…Friday afternoons?”  
  
“To you, coming out here to see me.” That English-countryside voice is warm, despite the rain. Affectionate sunshine on the hedgerows. “To…us, maybe?”  
  
“To us,” Erik agrees, and clinks his glass against Charles’s. “Can I ask you something?”  
  
Charles hesitates, for a split second. “Of course.”  
  
“Why _do_ you have an English accent?”  
  
Charles blinks, stares at him, and then starts laughing, so hard he nearly drops the champagne. Erik rescues it.  
  
He likes hearing Charles laugh. It’s an astonished wondering sound, as if only occasionally used for genuine merriment, and it’s real.  
  
“Oh, god,” Charles says, finally, leaning on the counter, reclaiming his drink. “No one ever asks. I suppose they all just don’t give a damn. I was born in England, in fact. Moved here when I was young; went back for Oxford, which I suppose knocked any lingering Americanisms out of me, except for the occasional craving for crunchy bacon and a tendency to drive on the wrong side of the road no matter which country I’m in. I have dual citizenship. Fair enough?”  
  
“Crunchy bacon?”  
  
Charles shrugs. “I like the texture.”  
  
“Next time I’ll bring you breakfast.” He takes a drink; so does Charles, with raised eyebrows. “Aren’t you Jewish? I thought I’d heard that, somewhere.”  
  
Somewhere, hmm? Charles, or more likely Emma Frost, must have interesting sources. That’s not widely advertised knowledge, not because he particularly cares about religion one way or the other, but because it’s _his_. Private. Something he’d shared with his mother, his father, not the world.  
  
Charles is still looking at him. Managing to express curiosity, and concern, and compassion, all at once, with those eyes.  
  
“My mother always liked to pretend I kept kosher,” he says. “We both knew I didn’t. She’d send me home with leftovers and tell me to come back when I ran out.” And then he finishes off the rest of his glass, because what the _hell_ just happened? Why why _why_ does Charles have magical truth-compelling eyes?  
  
“You love her.” Charles finishes his own drink. Pours more for them both. “And she sounds…kind.”  
  
“She was,” Erik says, briefly. “She’s dead. Cancer.” And drinks again.  
  
Charles picks up the champagne, pours. “And you still love her.”  
  
“I didn’t come here for a therapy session.”  
  
“No.” Charles spins the bottle idly on the marble countertop. Watches it revolve. Erik can’t tell what he’s thinking. “You came here to fuck me. I’m sorry. I’m in a complicated mood. I’ll try to do better. Would you want to go upstairs, now? I know it’s not a terribly welcoming house, but I’ll do my best to be hospitable. Possibly with handcuffs; would you like to see what I look like with my hands behind my back?”  
  
Erik, who’s just taken a sip of champagne, hoping to recover from the bizarre attack of personal oversharing, ends up trying to inhale bubbly alcohol, unsuccessfully.  
  
“Oh, sorry!” Charles genuinely looks apologetic. “Towel?”  
  
“Christ, Charles.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“You…why _are_ we here? This house.”  
  
“It’s my house. More or less.” Charles polishes off his own champagne, studies Erik’s half-full treacherous glass, consumes that too. “At least for now. Bedroom?”  
  
“Wait.” Erik puts a hand on his shoulder, stops him walking. “You…are you all right? You look…” He’s not sure how to phrase it. Withdrawn? Withdraw _ing_? Distant? That’s not quite right, Charles is certainly here, but…  
  
He wants that other laughing Charles, the one he’d caught a brief glimpse of, back again.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, even though he’s not sure what he’s apologizing for.  
  
Charles looks up at him incredulously. “What on earth for?”  
  
“I…don’t know. Can I kiss you?”  
  
“Oh, you want to get started here, we can do that—”  
  
“Please.”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says again, as Erik puts both hands on his shoulders, over the ludicrous fluffy cardigan. It’s soft under his fingers, as he reels Charles in.  
  
They kiss softly, slowly, lazily; he learns the shape of Charles’s mouth, tasting him from the inside, champagne-sparkles and almond bitterness. Nibbles the aristocratic line of that throat, the soft vulnerable spot under his jawline, the delicious curl of an ear. Charles shivers when Erik’s teeth nip gently over the pulse-point in his neck, and tips his head back for easier access, practically melting into his arms.  
  
“You like that?” He strokes a wayward loop of hair out of blue eyes. “Me marking you?” That _will_ leave a mark, that one.  
  
Charles sighs, “Yes,” and stretches up to kiss him on the lips, unreservedly hungry. Erik’s leaning back against the kitchen counter, which is digging into his hips; he’s got Charles between his legs, and when he shifts his weight, his arousal must be tangible, because he sees the smile before one freckled hand unbuckles his belt.  
  
“I wanted to do this for you. I wanted to undress you, at the hotel…on my knees…I wanted to know how you would feel, inside me. How you’d taste. But also…”  
  
“You want me to fuck you?” He’s unbuttoning the sweater, one fastening at a time. Anticipation. “Here? On your kitchen table?”  
  
“Oh, fuck,” Charles says, “yes,” and their clothes disappear in a flurry of fabric, and Charles starts laughing when his shirt lands atop the refrigerator, and Erik tells him “I like hearing you laugh” because he does, and then picks him up and sets him down on the table, which thankfully is large and heavy and looks unlikely to be impressed by anything short of an apocalypse.  
  
“Please,” Charles says, one hand already sliding between his own legs, lying there fingering himself open while Erik curses out loud and dives back for his pants and the condoms and lube in his pocket. “Please.”  
  
Decadent, opulent, sinful: like a feast spread out, appropriately enough, for the consuming, Erik thinks, and promptly goes back to nibbling, dining on every inch of him, licking freckled thighs and the surprisingly sensitive spot at the crease of Charles’s hip, until Charles swears out loud and demands that he come up there “right bloody _now!”_  
  
“Do you always get more British when you’re turned on—?”  
  
“Will you stop talking and fuck me?”  
  
“I can talk _while_ I fuck you—” He rips open the foil packet with the hand that’s not teasing Charles’s cock, which is just irresistible, perfectly proportioned to fit his hand, curving and flushed and ready. “Do you want me to talk? To tell you how much I want you, the way I got myself off in the shower last week, thinking about your mouth? Because I did, Charles. I pictured you in there with me, at my feet, your mouth on my cock, and I came imagining you there—”  
  
“Erik,” Charles gasps, lifting those legs, wrapping them around his waist, “ _yes_ —”  
  
He thrusts. Hard. Charles goes absolutely silent, arching up against him; but those lips are parted in pleasure as well as shock, those eyes enormous and shining.  
  
“Good?”  
  
Charles moans, apparently out of words, and pulls him closer, and Erik’s happy to oblige, sliding out and slamming back into him, grabbing those long legs and pushing them up over his shoulders, and Charles gasps this time, eyes sliding shut. “Erik—”  
  
“Yes?” Harder, this time; faster, too, speeding up, and Charles tenses and shudders under him, and whispers something, indistinct.  
  
“Hmm?” He slows, for just a second. “Too hard?”  
  
“No—” Charles blinks up at him, panting, hair stuck to his face. “So big, I said. You. You’re—oh _god_ —” This last because Erik hadn’t been able to help the movement, pushing into him even deeper, at those words, that pronouncement. “Too _good_ —”  
  
“Like this?” He shoves those legs up higher; Charles doesn’t argue, even though he’s practically being folded in half. Opened up and offered, for Erik to take. “You want me to come like this? Fucking you as hard as I can, on your kitchen table? Or—can _you_ come like this, just from my cock inside you? So big, you said…will you come from that? On my cock?”  
  
“Oh god,” Charles says again, a tiny silvery gasp, and then he _is_ , wet heat spilling out between them, shaking everywhere, body clamping down around Erik’s cock; and Erik plunges into him once more, twice, and groans his name and follows, ecstasy blurring his vision into white.  
  
When he starts to move, after some unknowable peaceful time, Charles lets out a small cry and clings to him, face buried in his neck. “Erik…”  
  
“Shh. It’s all right, I’m coming back, I just have to…” He rolls off the table, and off of Charles, with reluctance; looks around for condom-disposal options, settles for tossing it into a paper towel in the trash. His legs feel wobbly.  
  
When he turns back around, Charles is sitting up, blinking, running a hand through thoroughly disheveled hair. “I…Erik.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“We…my god, we just…” Charles looks down at the expanse of wood beneath him. Pats it, a little gingerly. “We’ve just had sex on my mother’s imported Balinese teak dining table.”  
  
“Does it mind?”  
  
“No…” He slides off the end and onto his feet. His legs wobble too. Erik, without thinking, catches him. “Thank you.”  
  
“For what,” Erik says, echoing Charles’s words from earlier; sees the smile when their eyes meet. “Upstairs? Ah…shower?”  
  
“Shower,” Charles agrees, and accepts the support without argument, while steering them there.  
  
The shower is sumptuous. Extravagant. As steeped in old wealth as the rest of the house. But here Erik finds he minds it less, certainly once Charles glances sideways at him, pure pint-sized mischief, and starts playing with myriad settings.  
  
“Massage? Rainshower? Deluge?”  
  
Erik splutters. “ _Not_ deluge. What’s this one? Pulse?”  
  
“Oh, I like that one.”  
  
“Do you…” Ah. Yes, he can see why. He aims it at Charles for a while, finding certain interesting places, while Charles yelps and squirms and doesn’t move away. “Not there, that’s kind of tender…”  
  
“Oh. Did I…”  
  
“No, you didn’t. I’m fine. And very clean, now.”  
  
“But I like you dirty,” Erik says, and Charles flings water at him, and so he resolves to make every terrible pun he can, in the future, at every opportunity.  
  
They wander out of the fabulous shower, first flush of need and desire and passion sated for now but lingering like sparks beneath skin; Charles maneuvers them through a connecting door and into a bedroom. “Home.”  
  
The room continues the general impression of neglected luxury, but here at least someone’s been fighting back against the entropy. There’s a tattered T.H. White paperback next to the bed. A lopsided tower of Heinlein novels. Clothing peeks coyly through a half-open closet door.  
  
Charles waves at the bed. “Let me introduce you. Erik, meet my bed.”  
  
Charles surely doesn’t actually expect him to say hello. He regards the exaggerated pile of pillows and fluff and blue satin and ornate bedposts with some reservation; it studies him right back, sizing up this person its owner’s brought home.  
  
Charles chooses to ignore this byplay, instead flopping down naked onto the pillows in a manner that shouldn’t be graceful or seductive but achieves both. “I do like my bed. Possibly the one piece worth salvaging. Well, this and the alcohol selection. What do you think?”  
  
“I…think I’ve left my clothing downstairs.”  
  
“Oh—”  
  
“ _Condoms_ , Charles.”  
  
“Oh. Ah…” Charles nibbles on his lower lip, for a second. “I have some, actually, but…you could…we could…we don’t have to.”  
  
“That…sounds like…a not good idea.” In fact, it sounds like a brilliant idea, and all the atoms of his body are shouting at him very loudly to shut up and say yes, but.  
  
He looks at Charles again. Charles, who works as an escort. Who very obviously hadn’t been a virgin when they’d met.  
  
He’s not sure how to frame that question without some sort of horrible insult; Charles is already blushing, pink everywhere, not looking at him.  
  
He knows he’s clean. He’s been careful, and he’s been tested, and it’s been months since he’s slept with anyone anyway, certainly since before his last doctor’s visit. And he doesn’t really think that Charles wouldn’t be careful also, but…  
  
“I…” Charles is still scarlet, over all the freckles. “You can check. I made an appointment, when I knew you’d be coming…oh, god, terrible word choice, I’m so sorry…that paper, though, on the desk, to your right…”  
  
He glances over, but doesn’t bother picking it up. Charles could just as easily not have said anything; it’s no doubt real.  
  
He walks over, instead, and sits down on the improbable bed. It’s unfairly comfortable. “You did that for us?”  
  
“Um. Yes?”  
  
“But you don’t know about me. You don’t know…” He fits a hand around the closest part of Charles, which happens to be an ankle. Fine-boned and flexible, it doesn’t resist his grip. “You would trust me?”  
  
“I know it’s stupid,” Charles says. “Believe me, I know. But you…” Another of those expressive lip-licks, from the depths of the bed. “You cared about me. That first night. Whether I was—was safe. So, yes, if you tell me we’re good, I’ll trust you.”  
  
Erik takes a deep breath. Lets it out. “We’re good.”  
  
And those sea-jewel eyes sparkle. “Good.”  
  
“So…” He taps fingers over that ankle, thin skin, complicated joint of bone and tendon. Charles lifts those very vocal eyebrows at him, but doesn’t say anything, only watching. “You want me here. In your bed.”  
  
“Very much yes.” Up on both elbows. Head tipped to the side, considering. “You can go open those drawers. Left side; pick one.”  
  
This time Erik raises the eyebrows. “Orders, Charles?”  
  
“No.” Charles gazes at him. “Options. I did tell you I had certain items. Feel free.”  
  
Given this invitation, he gets up. Finds the drawers, opens, stares.  
  
Charles has…many items, yes. Handcuffs. Vibrators in various shapes and sizes. Other, even less mainstream, options. Whips. Clamps. Cock rings. Paddles. A riding crop. He turns around to look at the bed; Charles looks back at him, but doesn’t offer any commentary, so he goes back to investigating.  
  
Leather. Two canes, in different wood. Ropes, both silk and rough. He pictures Charles tied down across that bed, elegant limbs fastened to all those spiraling bedposts by blue cord. Remembers to inhale.  
  
There’re some things he doesn’t recognize, which, fair enough, he’s not an expert in that particular scene. But some of them look…cruel.  
  
He picks up the riding crop, experimentally. Swishes it through the air. “You…use these?”  
  
“I prefer them used _on_ me, but yes, I can. If you want.”  
  
“You…I thought you said you’d never been an escort before.”  
  
“I haven’t, no.” Charles looks as if he’s waiting for a follow-up question, but Erik can’t think of what that might be, so lets it go.  
  
“So these are for fun.”  
  
“I…Emma’s clients…” Charles pauses, bites his bottom lip, hard enough to leave darker lines in pink skin. “They sometimes want…services…that her regular staff can’t…I can. But I prefer using my own, ah, equipment, if the client doesn’t mind. I’m sure you can guess why.”  
  
He sets the crop down. Very precisely. Back where he’d found it. There’s a whole confession in those few sentences, and if he pays attention to the neatness of the drawer, he won’t have to think about Charles providing services for Frost’s clients, for the clients who want _more_ , beyond what they’d normally get from a night of pleasure from a hired sex worker. Won’t have to picture Charles bruised or gagged or worse, bleeding, from whips or from knifeplay or from, god, being held down and—  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, voice a little urgent. “It’s all right. I’m all right. I don’t say yes to anything I’m not comfortable with. Or—I would say something, if I weren’t. I bought these. I—”  
  
“What if you couldn’t? Say no.” He turns around. “You—have you ever? Stopped anything?”  
  
Charles’s eyes flick away, all hidden sapphire dismay; that’s the answer. It’s not the one he wants.  
  
“Charles—” What can he say? This isn’t right, it’s not fair, it’s not fair to you? You can say no?  
  
But Charles knows that. He’s not stupid. He’s chosen this option, for whatever reason. He works for Emma Frost and lets himself be whipped and fucked and beaten with those canes and abused, for money, because he thinks it’s worth it, somehow, someway.  
  
He _can’t_ need the money that badly. He lives in this mansion. He’s bought these items. But maybe there are things Erik doesn’t know. Maybe Charles is sick, or dying, paying off hospital bills, something slow and lingering and devastating, the way Erik’s mother’d—  
  
“Erik—” Charles flows off the bed, one sinuous motion, and crosses the room in a lovely rush of freckles. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“I—” He fights for balance. Equilibrium. “Charles, you—you’re all right, are you? I mean—this isn’t—you’re not—”  
  
“What, secretly deathly ill and enjoying my final months of debauchery?” That accent sounds entertained by the concept, but the blue eyes soften with concern when they look up at Erik’s face, when Charles reaches for Erik’s hand, lifts it to his neck. “No. Nothing like that. Can you feel this? My pulse? That’s my heartbeat. Completely fine.”  
  
“You might—”  
  
“Erik. I’m fine.”  
  
They stand there for a while, unmoving, in Charles’s bedroom with the drawers full of leather and sin and the well-worn optimism of the science-fiction paperbacks beside the bed. With Erik’s hand, under Charles’s hand, resting over a pulse-beat, a steady drum-sound of life. Those ocean-glass eyes catch his own, and hold him, not letting go.  
  
“I’ve never brought anyone else back here,” Charles tells him, softly. “Always hotels; no one else but you. My bed, and my kitchen table, and you.”  
  
“All your surfaces,” Erik says, a little hoarsely. “Every last one.”  
  
“Really?” Wry, affectionate, smiling, fingers curling their way around his. “That might take a while. And I did mean it about introducing you to my pillows.”  
  
Erik turns his head. Says, “Hello,” to the pillows. He’s going to fuck Charles on them.  
  
And Charles laughs again. And Erik wants to taste that sound, every last glorious rippling note; wants to put him on his back on that feathery mattress and watch those extraordinary eyes go wide with bliss as Erik’s cock pushes inside him.  
  
“So,” he says. “Your bed.”  
  
The rain chooses this moment to splash dramatically against the windowpane.  
  
Charles, looking like the embodiment of decadence, hair drying into post-shower impossibilities, freckles glinting in the storm-light, grins: what’re we waiting for?  
  
“Did you…want me to pick things?” He glances back at the drawers. “Or—do you have favorites?”  
  
“Me?” A blink, a head-tip, considering.  
  
“Be honest.” Just in case.  
  
“Scarves,” Charles says, promptly. “Or the softer ropes. Luxurious. If you’re going to let me indulge myself.”  
  
“Hedonist. What else?”  
  
“Guilty. Cock rings. Or…anything along those lines, really…the denial…”  
  
“You want me to make you wait?” He slides a hand down to one graceful wrist. Squeezes. “You want me to make you beg for it?”  
  
“Yes. Is that…”  
  
“Oh,” Erik says, “I think I can manage that,” and steps a little closer to him, invading his space; hears the gasp.

He puts Charles on his back in the middle of the glorious bed. With scarves. With one of the intricate metal cages, trickily woven; he pauses to approve of the skill. It’s a bit more than a simple cock ring—Charles _had_ called himself a hedonist, and Erik couldn’t resist—but it lacks the sharp edges of some of the other, similar, options.  
  
Those make him stop, for an instant, hand hovering over the drawer. Too sharp. Too painful. He finds that the thought of Charles in agony, those pointed edges digging into tender flesh, is also painful.  
  
But this one shouldn’t hurt, or at least not more than frustration and containment will. Charles licks his lips; doesn’t object.  
  
“Can you come? With that on?”  
  
“Ah…” One more nibble, at the corner of a pink lip; Erik puts his thumb over that spot, keeping it from further abuse. Charles promptly licks that thumb, a laughing swipe of tongue; the smile’s evident, when he answers, once Erik reluctantly moves the hand. “Ye-es…not easily. But if you tell me to…”  
  
“Good.” He finishes securing those wrists above all the hair, on the pillows; the sapphire eyes dance. “You’re enjoying this? Me tying you up?”  
  
“I did tell you that I like my scarves.”  
  
“So you did.” He contemplates that knot. Tugs it a little tighter. “More? Less?”  
  
Charles twists his arms, experimentally. Those compact muscles bunch and flex; Erik swallows. “Good like this. Sir.”  
  
“…really.”  
  
Charles opens his mouth, tries to move—a one-shouldered shrug, Erik thinks, or what would’ve been—and then ends up laughing, embarrassed, happy. “I clearly should’ve thought that through…and, yes, if you don’t mind. I like the acknowledgement, if I’m going to be begging you for things.”  
  
“I don’t mind. Ready?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles breathes, looking up at him, still smiling, even as the smile transmutes into another emotion, deeper, more profound. “Yes, sir.”  
  
The scarves definitely work. Charles makes gorgeous needy sounds, abandoned and uninhibited; moans and gasps out Erik’s name, and, yes, begs, cock trapped in the metal web, strands pressing hard into his desperate flesh. Erik tells him no, and he moans again, eyes closing; but there’s just a hint of a smile flickering around his mouth.  
  
“I want you like this,” Erik tells him, “mine, all mine, asking me for what you need…how does this feel, Charles? How badly do you want it?”  
  
“Please,” Charles gets out, through a sound like a sob. “Please, Erik, yes—”  
  
“You said I could fuck you. You, and me, no condoms…I want to feel you. When I come inside you. When you feel me, filling you with it, and you’re not allowed, Charles, not until I say you can…”  
  
Charles catches breath, shudders, stares at him, eyes enormous, expanded pupils nearly swallowing the blue.  
  
“I like that thought,” Erik agrees, “too,” and he _very_ definitely likes this reaction, the way that Charles lights up and shivers at his words, his touch, so raw and open and sincere, holding nothing back and giving him everything; he likes the way his own heart picks up, in answer. And even if he’s never really done this before—well, other than that first time, with Charles himself—it’s working, and it’s good.  
  
He knows it is.  
  
Art, he thinks, fleetingly. Charles.  
  
He takes his time, opens Charles slowly, by increments; pauses to slip fingers through tormenting metal and tease. Charles swears and sobs his name and pleads, aristocratic accent unspeakably filthy now, and Erik says “wait” and Charles says “please,” voice shaking, so Erik leans down and looks at him from millimeters away. “Please what?”  
  
“Oh god,” Charles says, “please, sir,” and then shudders from head to toe, at the address or the surrender or the acknowledgement, or possibly all three, so Erik kisses him.  
  
And then fucks him.  
  
Charles is tight and wet and hot and feels like unbelievable perfection around him, and when he finds that taut electric spot and thrusts into it, along it, over it, Charles stops mid-scream and goes rigid, mouth shaping an “oh” with no sound.  
  
“Good,” Erik gasps, which should’ve been a question but doesn’t need to be, not with that evidence so obvious beneath him, and does it again, and Charles whimpers and quivers and rocks up against him, eyes huge and dark and lost in sensation.  
  
“I’m going to come,” Erik tells him, barely able to get words out past the fireworks in his head, his veins, the base of his spine, “inside you,” and Charles makes a sound, soft and keening and desperate, and Erik slips a hand under his head and kisses him hard, tongue plundering his mouth just to consume that sound, and Charles trembles from head to toe, sudden sharp shocks, and Erik realizes that he’s trying to come, needing to come, and _can’t_ , not without Erik’s permission, Erik’s release.  
  
He’s pushed Charles far enough for that, he thinks, enough to forget the order and simply _need_ , given over to Erik’s hands and cock and unthinking euphoria; and that thought pushes him over too, orgasm like the thunderstorm outside, lightning-bright and bursting through his body, and he feels himself spill into Charles, each pulse of it like nothing he’s felt ever before.  
  
The ocean-current eyes are wet around the corners, now, from denial, from the exquisite ordeal of overstimulation; Erik can hardly think, in the ebbing whirl of it, but he imagines what Charles must be feeling, the flood of heat against that spot inside him, the throbbing of his arousal, restrained there and leaking messily, helplessly, through its cage, Erik’s hand under his head…  
  
“You said,” he manages, “that you could, with this, that it’ll be—hard—but you can—”  
  
“Yes—” It’s a tiny cry, a cracking note of capitulation. “If you—if you tell me to I—”  
  
He says, softly, “Then I’m telling you,” and Charles shudders everywhere and collapses into incoherence, wetness pouring out between them, escaping from his reddened and swollen cock, Erik still buried inside him, half-hard, feeling each contraction and dazed twitch of muscle along his length.  
  
When he runs a thumb over those pink lips, Charles sighs, and opens his mouth and sucks at him, dreamily, despite the traces of shining tears over freckled cheeks. Erik breathes in; sits up. “Can I…I’m going to untie you. All right?”  
  
A nod; not talking, not yet. He slides out cautiously; slickness trails after, gleaming along one pale thigh, that intimately opened space between luscious curves. Charles trembles again.  
  
“Shh,” Erik says, and unfastens everything, gently, unhurriedly; grabs a washcloth from the marvelous bathroom and cleans them both up, taking extra care when his fingers and the wet cloth brush over visibly sore areas.  
  
It’s an odd feeling, in his chest; he isn’t sure how to categorize this one, as he dabs cooling water over all that sensitive skin, as Charles blinks pleasure-clouded eyes at him, trusting and compliant. There’s a bit of pain in those eyes—it clearly had hurt, the orgasm through bondage—but also a note as sweet and clear and sincere as raindrops on bluebells, as the taste of spring: Charles trusts him to make the hurt better, to make the pain go away.  
  
He wants to be the person who can do that. He wants to be that person.  
  
He also wants to see Charles fly apart like that again, at his command, giving him everything, taking everything, those lips kiss-bruised and the freckles marked with Erik’s mouth and teeth and demands; he wants Charles on his knees and wrapped up in silk ropes and gazing at him with those ecstatic eyes. His. Completely.  
  
Charles brought him here, into this house, where no other client has ever been allowed.  
  
“Charles,” he says, very quietly.  
  
“Hmm?” One more satisfied lazy blink; and then, abruptly, an expression of sheer shock, bolting upright. Their heads nearly collide. “You—I should be—you’ve been—I’m sorry, Erik, I should’ve offered to do this for you, I—”  
  
“You were tired. I let you rest.” Has no one ever offered any aftercare, for him? Or does Charles simply always ensure he offers first?  
  
“I’m so sorry,” Charles says again, looking panicked. “I don’t—I don’t normally—I don’t know what that was—”  
  
“That was you having an orgasm, I thought.”  
  
“Well, yes, but—”  
  
“You _have_ had orgasms before.” Very dry, teasing, or hopefully so; it works, at least to a degree, because Charles now looks rather affronted.  
  
“Of course I have—but, Erik—”  
  
“Come here.” He stretches back out on the bed. Charles stares at him. Erik’s reminded of that first night, the wary way those blue eyes’d settled beside him, hovering as if poised to take flight at any moment. “Please.”  
  
“I—” Charles says, and then shakes his head, and then curls up with that head on Erik’s hip, more or less in his lap, and kisses the tip of his softening erection gently: some sort of apology, perhaps, in that complicated and constantly self-aware mind.  
  
Okay. It’ll be a compromise, then.  
  
He puts a hand on Charles’s head, running fingers through the cheerful strands. “Are you hungry?”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“It’s getting late. Do you have any food around here?”  
  
“You want dinner? Here?” With me? says the tone.  
  
“I was thinking about that, yes.”  
  
“…I…don’t really cook. But there’re take-out menus downstairs in the kitchen—oh, that poor kitchen…it’ll never be the same. Scandalized.”  
  
I know the feeling, Erik almost says. Never the same. That thought scares him, deep inside, so he pushes it away. “Your mother’s table, you said…”  
  
“She passed away. Fairly recently. Alcohol, pills…” Charles yawns, sleepy and honest, into his leg. “Her body just gave out, from the reports.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Why? She’d been gone for a long time before that.” Charles kisses him again. “Along with my father, and my stepfather…you know, I don’t do this. Tell anyone this. But you…”  
  
“You don’t have anyone?”  
  
“Do you? I’m sorry, it’s not the most uplifting post-coital pillow talk, is it? Should I—”  
  
“I don’t have anyone,” Erik tells him, and winds a loop of that hair around his fingers, thinking of his metals, in the studio, copper and bronze and white gold for that skin, “either.”  
  
“Oh—you don’t have to—”  
  
“My parents wanted to come to New York for a better life. For me. The year after we got here my father was killed by a drunk driver. The man got his license revoked and a slap on the wrist. I was…angry.” An understatement if there ever was one; but then, he’s not ready to give everything away. Not yet. “My mother…she was diagnosed around the time I sold my first sculpture.” To Sebastian; but he’s not going to say that either.  
  
“She must’ve been proud.”  
  
“She was. She was so—she believed I’d do great things. She told me she knew it.” Sebastian’d told him that, too. Had said, the day before Erik’d walked out at last, that they’d do great things together.  
  
Anarchy. Violence. Bombs. Not merely protests. You were in favor of changing the status quo, he’d said, when Erik’d argued on behalf of innocent lives. You’ve seen the system and it’s broken. We’re artists, Erik, and this is the greatest art of all.  
  
Erik had turned his back on the words, and taken deliberate steps away.  
  
Sebastian’s grand schemes never had quite materialized. He’d always wondered why, in the back of his head. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, the dynamite to explode.  
  
“You _are_ doing great things.” Oh. The present. With Charles.  
  
With Charles, who's nothing like Sebastian; Charles, who’s been hurt by the world as badly as anyone ever has been, but who’d looked at his metalwork, that first night, and seen hope, and possibilities.  
  
“You are,” Charles says again, fiercely, “you inspire people, Erik, and your work is beautiful,” and Erik laughs, helplessly, and says, “Charles,” and wants to kiss him, except that Charles blushes and kisses his cock again instead, and then Erik’s stomach growls.  
  
“Oh, dinner!” Charles says, nibbling at the base of his shaft, tongue flicking out over the weight below. “Do you want me to—”  
  
“You—you’re very good at that—”  
  
“Thank you—”  
  
“You should probably stop if you want actual food any time soon…” That thought kindles another. “Charles?”  
  
“Yes?” That tongue’s continuing to be busy. Some very interesting motions.  
  
“I was—if you don’t mind—”  
  
“In general I don’t. What?”  
  
“What’s the…what have people asked you to…you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”  
  
“Hmm.” Charles’s tongue flicks out to taste his thigh, playfully. “I don’t mind. Telling you. Besides the whips, and gags, and vibrators, and so on, that’s practically everyday…if you want amusing, there was the one who wanted me to wear the cat ears and tail. Told me I was a good kitten, and so on.”  
  
“…not _seriously_.”  
  
“He was very serious. I did my best not to laugh.” One visible blue eye sparkles up at him, inviting him into the joke. “If you actually meant the most intense, though, it’s in fact the same person. That one did end up being more…the second time he asked for me, he wanted to put me on a leash and fuck me with a strap-on that…ah, you know cats have…spines…”  
  
“…christ.”  
  
“I think that’s the only time I’ve seen Emma physically threaten someone. She got worried, when I didn’t answer the phone, and she came and found me…she told him she’d put it up his own backside, and twist, if he came near me again. And then she called in a physician who owed her a favor, and _then_ she yelled at me for an hour about taking care of myself and her profit margin.”  
  
“Charles…” He doesn’t know how to respond. Charles says it all so casually, as if this is normal, as if being found naked and bleeding on the floor is just another story, for him, and Erik can’t picture that, can’t even hear the words without a red haze tinting his vision.  
  
“You…you’re…you were all right? I mean…”  
  
“Fine, after a couple of weeks. I heal fast. That’s why I only ever use my own equipment, these days.” A lazy shrug, as if it’s all inconsequential. “If you want a slightly happier story, there was the time the group paid for three of them to have me at once. Which I admit I liked, feeling that…full…being enjoyed by all of them….possibly that counts as four people, I suppose,  if you include the one who only wanted to watch. Or…there was the one who…in the shower…he put me on my knees, in the hotel shower—which wasn’t actually big enough for two people, that one, but he was determined—and, er…he told me I didn’t deserve his orgasm, and so he ordered me to get myself off while he…relieved his need to urinate…on me.”  
  
“Did you get off?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Would you…do that for me?”  
  
“If you asked…yes.” Charles shuts his eyes; Erik can feel the sweep of his eyelashes. “But…that was…if I’d been going to say no to anything…no, that’s not true. I did it. And I did get off. I won’t pretend I didn’t.”  
  
“I won’t ask,” Erik tells him, words as soft as that breath caressing his leg, the breath that Charles lets out at the words. It’s not exactly a hardship; not as if the thought’d ever even occurred to him.  
  
He doesn’t like it now that it has, though that may have less to do with the act and more to do with the territoriality of it: Charles is _his_. No one else’s.  
  
Maybe he can drag Charles into the shower— _this_ shower, where no one else has ever been, with the lovely settings—and push him to his knees; they can _both_ get off, and he can cover Charles in himself that way, instead.  
  
“Erik,” Charles ventures, to the bone of his hip, “can I ask you…”  
  
“Anything. Go on.” He rests his hand on that fluffy-haired head, exertion having turned all the dark waves into merry twirls and loops. “I want you to ask.”  
  
“It’s not about sex. Or, well, it is, I suppose, since sex is likely to happen again, but that’s also sort of why I was asking, I thought I should ask you now instead of while we were actually—”  
  
“Sometime today.”  
  
“That’s what,” Charles says, face hidden from view. “If you wanted to stay. Longer. The night, or—or the weekend…”  
  
It’s so far from what he’s been expecting—he’s not sure _what_ he was expecting, some new position or suggestion of other toys or a comment about dinner or anything else—that he can’t form an answer. Can only lie there blinking at the ceiling like a stunned goldfish.  
  
He can _feel_ the exact moment that Charles stops tentatively bravely hoping for the yes. It’s physical, the sudden barricades, the retreat behind defensive walls, even though the outward posture doesn’t change.  
  
“Never mind, I only—we said Friday, and today is Friday, and we only said today—you can—someone else can see you the next time you need a—an escort—I could probably recommend—”  
  
“What the _fuck_ , Charles!” Except he knows. “You can’t honestly think I want anyone else. No one else. No one but you. Understand?”  
  
No answer. Erik swears out loud again, a few colorful languages. “Look at me. Now.”  
  
The order works, though that pointed chin trembles, before Charles gets control over his expression and his eyes. “Yes, sir.”  
  
“You surprised me,” Erik tells him. “Yes, I want to stay.”  
  
This time it’s Charles who does the stunned goldfish impression.  
  
“Listen.” He runs a hand through all that hair. Down to the back of Charles’s neck. Leaves it there. “Don’t think—if I don’t give you the right answer on the spot—that it’s a no. That it’s…yes or nothing. This is new for me. And I’m probably going to fuck it up at some point. But that’s not about you. Just…give me a minute to think when you ask for something big. Okay?”  
  
Charles watches him with eyes like the slow emergence of sunrise: pale hints of gold, questioning their place in all that night-blue, unfolding by degrees into brilliant light. “You said yes.”  
  
“Yes, I did. I do want to. You did hear me, right?” He runs his thumb, not hard, over the mark he’d left earlier on the pale line of that throat.  “Is that all right?”  
  
And that gets a smile, a real one, coruscatingly bright. “Yes. I might—it might not be easy. What you’re asking. You need me to trust you.”  
  
Put that way, in that medieval-spires voice, he understands what it comes down to. How much he’s asking, of those blue eyes.  
  
He opens his mouth, but Charles has continued to talk. “I can’t promise you that I won’t fuck it up either. I’m not—good at that. Trusting people. But I’ll try. I did hear you, and I’ll try.”  
  
You’re beautiful, Erik wants to say, then, looking at him. You’re beautiful, and you confuse the hell out of me, and you’re possibly the bravest person I’ve ever met, and I want to rescue you from this life and I want to thank this life because I’d never have met you, and you’ll argue that you don’t need rescuing, but that’s not the point.  
  
The point is that he suspects that Charles is rescuing _him_.  
  
What he says is, “Thank you.” And Charles smiles again, open and welcoming despite the fading pain, real despite the stumble. “Don’t thank me yet. You’ve yet to experience the delights of spending any time in this house.”  
  
“I think…your bed is fairly delightful. With you in it.” The house is somewhat depressing, but this room, this space, isn’t. The thunder booms, jovially, and Charles’s hair is tickling his hip.  
  
“About me staying the weekend, though…what we just said…I’ll need to stop by home, or at least to someplace where I can get clothes and a toothbrush. So I will have to leave, for a while. I’ll come back. And you’ll remember that.” An order, that one is. Charles, in response, slides up the bed and studies his eyes for a moment and kisses the corner of his mouth. “Yes, I will. Thank you.”  
  
“I can…we can…I can stay. Tonight. I’ll run out in the morning and come back. If you want.”  
  
“Can we order pizza? For tonight?”  
  
“I suppose so,” Erik says, “yes,” and puts an arm around him. “What do you want on it?”  
  
“Jalapeños and bacon and pineapple?”  
  
“I may have to reconsider picking up my toothbrush tonight. Yes, fine.” He adds, “I can pay,” belatedly, because he’s still none too confident about Charles’s financial state. The puzzle pieces don’t reconcile.  
  
“You don’t have to—”  
  
“I’ve sold more pieces, and picked up more commissions, in the last two weeks than I have all year. I’ll pay.” Plus a kiss to that raised eyebrow, because he can. “And thank you for that, by the way.”  
  
“All I did was talk to people.”  
  
“You’re charming. I’m not.”  
  
“I find you extremely charming. Especially _this_ part of you.”  
  
“I’m not wooing patrons with _that_.”  
  
“I should hope not. That’s—” Charles stops.  
  
“What?”  
  
A headshake, shrouds in the blue eyes, burials at sea.  
  
“Charles. What?”  
  
“I was going to say,” Charles says, not looking, “that’s only for me. But—”  
  
“It’s not as if I want anyone but you,” Erik tells him, “even if you put pineapple on pizza,” and Charles looks up at him, eyes bright, and it’s another hour before they get around to ordering anything after all.  
  
Erik runs downstairs and grabs his jeans from the kitchen and answers the delivery knock that way, toes tingling with the marble floor and the rain; he brings the pie back upstairs and Charles curls up into his side and nibbles at it, still naked, and the television plays old black and white creature movies at them, _Beast From 20,000 Fathoms_ and _Fiend Without A Face_ and the original _King Kong_.  
  
He borrows Charles’s toothbrush, after the pizza. Charles laughs, and ducks in under Erik’s arm to kiss him while handing over toothpaste, and they fall asleep tangled together, to the clamor of the storm.  
  
In the morning, there’s a break in the tempest; he studies the greyness with misgiving. “I should probably go now. Make a run for it.”  
  
Charles stretches, unselfconsciously nude amid the royal blue and dark wood of his bed. “I could stay here. Keep myself occupied, waiting for you.”  
  
“Will you?” He can’t resist one more kiss, off-balance, tugging on his jeans. “What will you do, anyway? Did you have…plans? For the weekend?”  
  
“I…do have some work to do,” Charles admits, licking his lips as if trying to taste Erik there. “I should—it won’t take long. I won’t let it, I mean. I’ll be ready when you get back.”  
  
“I enjoy you being ready for me…” There’s a question there, not quite formed. Work? What sort? But he knows what Charles does for a living; obviously no one else is coming over, but there’s that laptop and that webcam lurking meaningfully on the corner desk…  
  
He can’t bring himself to ask. He’s all but promised Charles his own fidelity. Charles _can’t_ , in his situation, in this line of…work, promise the same. He knows that.  
  
“I might have pineapple-flavored lube,” Charles says, meditatively, and Erik promptly forgets his unasked question, says, “Two hours, back here, wait for me with your handcuffs,” and sprints out the door, dressed in yesterday’s clothes.


	7. Charles Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles makes a discovery about that last name on his list. Hurt, comfort, Erik taking care of him with cuddles and sculpture-sketches in bed and all the extra-kinky sex. (Check the tags. No, seriously.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day early because tomorrow's the Fourth of July, and the Husband has tomorrow and Friday off, so we'll probably be busy... More on Monday! Love you all! Thanks for reading!

Charles remains in bed, naked, after Erik leaves. Finds himself grinning at the ceiling, at the absurd plaster curlicues and patterns. He’d never cared much for them before, but they’re here, they were here with him and Erik, and just at the moment he adores them. They likely couldn’t care less; but he does regardless.  
  
Erik. Erik wants to stay, is planning to return, to pick up a toothbrush and a change of clothes and come back to him. Heard all of Charles’s confessions—well, some of them, certainly enough to send any rational person screaming for the hills—and still wants to stay.  
  
And the sex is _incandescent_.  
  
He can feel his whole body tingling, alive with it even hours later: thoroughly taken and claimed and used and wanted and cared for, god, even that, the way Erik had touched him, at the end, had looked at him, using the warm wet washcloth to clean him after, considerate and tender…  
  
He should probably be tired, but his present and rather demanding erection doesn’t seem to’ve got the memo; the thought of Erik’s hands on him is making him even harder, as he lies there in the bed they’ve shared, bare skin on luxurious sheets, and when he idly wraps one hand around himself and strokes he nearly reaches orgasm on the spot, picturing those green-grey-blue eyes, seeing the look on Erik’s face at the peak, imagining Erik’s release inside him…  
  
Somewhat to his own surprise, he comes, and comes hard, from the thought alone; and then he sprawls there panting for a while.  
  
Erik Lehnsherr. Good god.  
  
Still collapsed across the bed, he makes a mental note to send Emma flowers. An entire rosebush. A rose _garden_. She’ll doubtless roll her eyes, but it’ll be an apology of sorts, because he can’t see himself taking on any other clients, can’t see himself wanting anyone else, not now that he’s felt…everything he’s felt. With Erik. His artist.  
  
Erik _will_ be coming back. And he does have work to do, before that happens. More boxes to excavate in his father’s private study. One name left to find. Cassandra.  
  
He really ought to shower. Erik might not mind, of course, finding him this way; or, then again, might. Might object to Charles having gotten himself off without permission; that element of ongoing denial and control is, more or less, on the table and open for acceptance at this point.  
  
Literally on the table, he thinks, and finds himself grinning at the overdecorated ceiling once more. Also ongoing. Because Erik’s returning. To him. With a toothbrush.  
  
He sits up and rolls off the bed—muscles protest slightly, but he’s not that sore, he’s felt far worse on many occasions, and this is the good kind of soreness, the kind that kindles cravings for more—and showers and throws on jeans and another old-fashioned cardigan, because it’s cozy and because he rather likes the way Erik’d looked at him, the day before, as if speculating about the best way to strip the layers off.  
  
His ebullient mood does fade somewhat as he heads off to the third floor and that voiceless gloom. It’s impossible not to feel the chill, with the reminders hanging heavy in the air. You think Erik wants you, mutter the dusty curtains, the planks of furniture. He wants you now. Will he want you, would anyone want you, knowing _all_ of your confessions? The shadows add, insidiously, he wants the escort, only an escort, that’s all he asked for, Charles, when will you quit being stupid enough to hope otherwise? You know this isn’t real.  
  
Their voices sound like his father’s, like Kurt’s; he bites his lip until it stings. I’m good at sex, he retorts silently. I can make Erik happy with sex. I _am_. That’s real.  
  
The furnishings don’t venture anything after that, but he has the impression they’re laughing at him.  
  
He rummages through the last of the neatly labeled case files, the ones in boxes; leaves stacks of manila folders and typewritten reports on the dull red carpet, tagged with post-its, with his own notes so he’ll remember what they say. He’ll destroy them later; every so often a phone call or an email turns up, someone inquiring delicately whether the Xavier labs ever did have research on supergenuis children that, say, the Pentagon might be able to use. His family’s ruined enough lives, and he won’t let it all happen again. They deserve to live in peace, wherever they’ve all ended up.  
  
Some annoyingly self-aware part of his brain snipes: yes, and what about you? He mentally waves it away. He doesn’t deserve that peace. He doesn’t deserve anything.  
  
He’d fled the house for Oxford and tried not to look back; had only given in, once his mother had passed away at last, once no one else was left to respond when those calls and emails nibbled at the past, when the guilt’d become too strong.  
  
Someone has to do something to keep them safe. He’s here because he’s the one who can. And this _is_ what he deserves, perhaps: being back here, in this house. With the memories. After all, he’s not located them all. He hasn’t managed to succeed at this either.  
  
Raven would tell him he’s wrong, but his dearly adored adopted sister is out in California, and the last time they’d spoken she’d asked him how he was feeling, whether the migraines still came and went, and he’d lied and told her he was doing better.  
  
She’s safe, in California. Building her own life. Away from all of this; his father had never touched her anyway, he’d made sure of that. And she’s better out of it. She’s happy. They don’t talk much, but he knows she is.  
  
His head aches now, phantom twinges at his temples, both sides. Absentmindedly, he rubs the left one. This fails to provide a magical cure.  
  
He wonders whether, if he might possibly conceivably tell Erik what he’s doing, Erik will care. Potentially even want to help.  
  
Erik used to be an activist, joining in social protests, full of fire and ferocity at the injustices of the world. His file, in Emma’s posession, is quite thorough, though it’s missing some pieces, like the way pale river-water eyes turn wistful when he speaks of his mother, the way they brighten again when he’s teasing, when he grins with all those teeth, exuberant and gleeful.  
  
Erik is, for all that the social-protest side has calmed in recent years, the focus on art and dedication taking precedence, a man who sees good and evil, right and wrong, very clearly.  
  
He rubs that ghostly scar again. He can’t tell Erik. Not this. Erik’s here for the sex, here to fuck him, and if Erik sometimes wants to hold him afterwards or buy their shared pizza or kiss him in the morning, well, that’s what Erik wants. He’s had clients want far kinkier things. And he won’t deny that he’s enjoying it, and he won’t let himself think that it’s anything to do with him.  
  
He looks lonely, he’d said to Emma, speaking of Erik’s picture. He suspects that’s true. It explains the pizza, and the desire to stay. Erik simply needs someone to hold onto with all that passion. Charles is the one who’s here.  
  
Like himself in this house. Facing the files spread out in front of him, a mocking bland semi-circle of failure.  
  
Right, he thinks, determinedly. Not Erik. Cassandra.  
  
Even the name’s unusual; his father’s code system should’ve given her another word, a phrase, a means of concealment. Unless it is a code: Cassandra of Troy, perhaps, cursed to cry out dire warnings that no one would ever believe…  
  
There’s one other subject who had, briefly, been referred to by his first name. Before the other children had ever arrived.  
  
He looks at his father’s safe. He’d had to pick the lock, to get in. Just one more of those useful skills he’s acquired in the course of his current life. He can also open handcuffs with a paperclip, and bend far enough to get his feet behind his head. Maybe he can be a contortionist. In a circus show.  
  
He’s very aware that he’s avoiding the issue at hand. As it were.  
  
He’s always been reluctant to look at his own file. He’d read through it once, out of ghoulish curiosity, the first time; he’d had to know. It hadn’t been much of a surprise, and he’s mostly refrained from opening it, other than to double-check dates and procedures in use with other files, since then.  
  
He pulls out the massive sheaf of pages—thicker than the rest, but of course his father’d had more time with him—and starts skimming through, trying not to think about the words and what they say, letting his eyes run ahead across the text.  
  
He’s not sure what he’s looking for, precisely, but he finds it in one of the earliest lab reports, jotted on one side, easy to miss and blurred with age and poor penmanship and his own encroaching migraine. _Subject may now have surpassed Cassandra X in mental ability. Perhaps fortuitous accident after all?_  
  
Accident?  
  
He gets down on his knees—it’s an antique floor-safe, and Cain’d locked him in once, when they’d been boys; no one’d found him for almost a day—and starts checking the sides, the top, the bottom. He’s been through all the files, and he’d thought he’d cleaned out everything; obviously not, though. Not yet.  
  
The bottom clicks.  
  
There’s one slim folder inside.  
  
He sits down cross-legged with his back against the safe door, and opens it. The room’s very tense, full of dour anticipation.  
  
The file’s labeled Cassandra X, and it begins with a birth date, which is his own, and a time, which is four minutes before his.  
  
The wind gusts dramatically around the windowpane; he jumps, and hits his elbow on the safe door, rather excruciatingly.  
  
He has a twin. A twin sister. Who’d undergone the same tests, the same procedures, that he had, indulging Brian Xavier’s obsession with scientific and genetic enhancement—  
  
No. He’d _had_ a sister.  
  
There’s a note at the end of the file. Results unexpected. Subject Cassandra X experienced cardiac arrest and was unable to be resuscitated. Subject Charles X more resilient. Link between marginally lower IQ (at genius levels) and determination to perform? S.X. incapable of comment; research stages of grief?  
  
Subject Cassandra X disposed of.  
  
Subject Charles X unusually subdued. Twin connection not mere metaphysical rumor after all? Untestable at this date. Subject Charles X refuses food.  
  
Subject Charles X refuses food.  
  
Subject Charles X fed via intravenous delivery system. More subjects may be necessary for experimental redundancy and verification of results. Handwritten: _or in case this one gives up too_.  
  
More subjects acquired.  
  
New coding system implemented; subject Charles X henceforth “Professor” in files (cf Beast, Cyclops, et al).  
  
He remembers none of this. He ought to; from the dates, he’d been just over two years old. _They’d_ been two years old.  
  
“Cassandra,” he says. The name’s swallowed up by time. Eaten by the muffling walls.  
  
He puts the file back. Puts them all back, one by one. Walks downstairs and into the liquor cavern, picks up the first bottle his eyes land on, takes a gulp. It tastes like burning blueberries; the bottom glints with flecks of edible gold. Perhaps he’s drinking metal, a heavy weight in his stomach.  
  
Alchemy. Impure flesh somehow transmuted to something new. Unrecognizable.  
  
He can cross the final name off his list. Strike it out, the way his father had: disposed of.  
  
He’s _done_. He can’t think. The wind howls, racing around the house.  
  
He calls Raven, numbly. Leaves a message; she doesn’t pick up, not out on the West Coast, likely busy with her make-up artist job or out with friends or just not answering. That’s how this works, most of the time: he calls to tell her what he’s found, and she calls back a few hours later to tell him how her day’s been going, her life, the pieces that’re valuable to her.  
  
He never asks her to come back home. She never says those other words, _stop being a martyr_ or _you’re spending your life making up for your family’s mistakes_ or _you don’t deserve this_ or _I can’t be a part of your crusade, I need a new life, I need to be happy._  
  
They’ve had all those arguments already. Tired ground.  
  
The last time she’d called back, she’d said she’d met someone. A woman. Older, with dark hair, who makes her smile.  
  
Erik will be returning soon, he recalls, as if from a long way away.  
  
He doesn’t tell Raven about Erik. He doesn’t know what, if anything, there is to tell.  
  
She’d probably approve of him finding someone. She might not approve of how; but, then, they’ve given up on that argument too: she can see that he needs the release, even if she doesn’t understand it, and Charles doesn’t especially want to have any in-depth sex-life discussions with his adopted sister.  
  
He’s aware that he’s thinking about Raven and Erik and sex and inconsequential things. Avoiding the moment when this discovery will have to become real.  
  
He tells Raven, over the soundless phone, that he’s found the last one; and he hangs up, and then realizes he’s forgotten to say I love you.  
  
Cassandra X. Cassandra Xavier. More promising than he’d been; more impressive, even as a baby.  
  
More _dead_. Because of that. Because Charles hadn’t been the stronger one; because he’d been able to handle slightly less, and so he’d been allowed to live.  
  
His hands’ve started to shake.  
  
He walks out into the sheet-draped formal parlor. There’re family portraits in there, stiff and formal, spotting the walls. Brian Xavier’s is gone, ruthlessly replaced by Kurt Marko, scowling at the camera; his mother looks vacant in hers, staring off glassily into the distance. S.X. incapable of comment.  
  
He looks for, and finds, his own. Expensively dressed, hair unnaturally flattened, the way it’d never looked in his life. Unusually subdued; well, child abuse will do that, he thinks.  
  
But he’s alive to think so.  
  
He runs for the nearest toilet and makes it just in time. After his stomach’s finished protesting the presence of fermented berries and acid and last night’s pizza, he stumbles upstairs and into his shower and lets the hot water sear across his face, scalding his skin.  
  
Erik’s not back by the time he gets out, so he gets dressed, rubbing a towel over his hair, letting it dry in unpredictable swoops and waves. Whatever it wants to do.  
  
He’s walking back downstairs, composedly, foot on the bottom stair, when there’s a knock at the door, and it startles him badly enough that he misses the step and falls and can’t stop the gasping cry of pain when he tries to move his ankle.  
  
The door slams open, Erik evidently pulled inside by that sound, shedding shoulder bag and paper grocery sacks on the spot and sprinting through the empty space. “Charles!”  
  
“Did I not lock the door,” Charles says, vaguely, and tries to sit up.  
  
“No, you didn’t—don’t move, are you all right, what happened—” Erik’s hands find his ankle. “Here? Is this where it hurts?”  
  
Yes. No. Everything hurts, but nothing does; shock, he self-diagnoses, though knowing the condition doesn’t help.  
  
“Erik,” he says, because Erik is here. And then, “I’m sorry,” because Erik asked him for something, asked him to be in bed with the handcuffs on, smiling and happy and waiting…  
  
Erik swears in German. It’s a good language for that.  
  
“Talk to me. Tell me how this feels. I don’t think it’s broken…”  
  
“It’s not.”  
  
“You—you’re shaking, Charles, tell me—”  
  
“I can’t—I don’t know how to—”  
  
Erik swears again. “Look at me. Did you hit your head, when you landed? Do you feel dizzy?”  
  
“I—yes, but that’s not why—” He sits up, awkwardly, Erik’s arm around his shoulders. “I’m fine, I only—it was just me being clumsy, Erik, I’m sorry—”  
  
“Don’t—” Erik stops, breathes out, a measured but impatient huff of air. “Don’t apologize. And you’re not clumsy. I know you’re not. I’ve seen you. Here…” Before he can protest, muscular arms scoop him off the floor and deposit him on the closest sofa. It’s the uncomfortable one he’s occasionally passed out on, too tired or intoxicated or in pain to make it up to his room. There’s probably some sort of irony in that, somewhere.  
  
“Tell me if this hurts.” Erik’s running hands over his ankle, pressing expertly, testing.  
  
“I don’t think—oh _bloody_ _hell_ —”  
  
“You also get more British when you’re hurt,” Erik murmurs, and sets his foot down on the cushion. “I’ll have to remember that. I don’t think it’s even sprained, but you twisted it pretty badly. I can—do you have a first-aid kit? I’ll wrap it for you.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles manages, “it’s under my bed,” because it is, fully stocked and tidily packed in case he needs it, after any appointments or assignations, but then, as Erik moves to stand up, he hears himself say “please don’t,” and the words’re barely recognizable.  
  
Erik stops. Even his shoulders radiate concern. “You…don’t want me to help?”  
  
“No,” Charles says, “no, I mean I do, you can, absolutely you can, but don’t go, don’t get up yet, I can’t—” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for.  
  
But evidently Erik does, because he sits back down. Offers an arm; Charles tucks himself under it gratefully, cold all over.  
  
“Thank you. I’ll be fine, I’m just…I just need…”  
  
“Charles,” Erik asks again, voice deliberately undemanding but shot through with worry, “what happened?”  
  
“I was—I told you I needed to do some work, and I was looking through my father’s—I have a twin.” And then, correcting, “Had. I mean. I had a…twin sister.”  
  
Those eyebrows’re growing more concerned by the second. “Charles—here, focus, look at me—so you didn’t know?” The arm around his shoulder is tight, and protective, and anxious. “And that’s…not good?”  
  
“My father,” Charles says, and stops. “My father—he—oh god, Erik, my father killed my sister,” and Erik’s arm loosens in shock and Charles leans forward and drops his face into his hands and tries to breathe and can’t, the world deciding now’d be a really excellent time to turn upside down, and Erik’s hands are suddenly vise-like on his biceps, holding him, holding him _up_.  
  
“Charles, breathe!”  
  
“—can’t—”  
  
“Fuck—yes you can, come on, that’s a fucking order, Charles, listen to me, breathe!”  
  
“You don’t understand,” Charles manages, gulping in air, “that was me, that could’ve been me, would have been, if I’d been the brighter one, I’d be dead, I’m alive because I wasn’t—I think I’m probably a bit hysterical, sorry—”  
  
“It’s okay.” Erik’s eyes are wide with fear, but those fingers, when they cup his cheek, are rock solid. Unwavering. “I think you’re allowed. What you just said…”  
  
“You don’t believe me…”  
  
“I do.” Erik puts the other hand on his face, also, cradling his head in long-fingered stability. “You might have to explain—not now if you don’t want to—but I believe you. What can I do?”  
  
“Take me upstairs. Please.”  
  
“Bed? Of course, if you—”  
  
“No,” Charles says, shaking all over, “no, or yes, bed, but I need you, Erik, I need you to fuck me, please, hold me down or tie me up and use anything you want, but I want you inside me, I want to feel you—”  
  
“Charles—” Erik’s kneeling in front of him, on the shabby remains of the valuable plush rug, wine-stain lurking like a faded ghost in the corner. Those eyes are stricken. “I can’t—are you sure? You can barely breathe, you said yourself you were panicking—”  
  
“I said I was hysterical. Not panicking. I’m not panicking.”  
  
“Seriously? We’re having an argument about vocabulary?—but, yes, if you want, but Charles—”  
  
“Please.” He’s begging now. Doesn’t know how to make Erik see. “I need to—to feel real. To be here because you want me, to be here because—not because someone didn’t want me—not because I don’t deserve to be here—that’s a double negative, I’m sorry—I can’t talk. But please. I’m asking, please.”  
  
“You do deserve to be here,” Erik whispers, and the fury in those eyes is awesome to behold, outrage that anyone could make him think otherwise, that he’d believe it. It’s almost like feeling loved. “And _I_ want you. I—can you stand?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Charles says, and wants to cry.  
  
“All right.” Erik’s quiet for a second, options flickering behind his eyes. “I’m going to carry you. That’s not a debate. When we get to your room, I want you naked, and I want you on the bed. Clear?”  
  
Yes. And the world calms, focusing in around those words. The eye at the center of the hurricane. He nods.  
  
The passage up the stairs happens in a kind of distant blur, as if glimpsed through fog, unreal. The only real part is Erik’s strength around him, arms supporting him, soft fabric of that turtleneck inviting against his cheek. The scent of rain-damp and male skin and the indefinable heat that says _Erik_ to his senses.  
  
Erik settles him on the bed. “You’ve changed clothes,” Charles observes, still watching him, thinking of nothing else, only Erik. An anchor. A safe path back to land, while he’s falling.  
  
This earns another frown. “I did tell you where I was going…I brought clothing for tomorrow, as well. And food. I was planning to cook for you. Are you certain you’re up to—”  
  
“Please.”  
  
Erik looks into his eyes, deeply, and Charles tries to look back with all the need and conviction he can muster; must work well enough, because he gets a nod. “Strip. Without getting up, please. Be careful of your ankle.”  
  
He nods back, and after some hopefully intriguing demonstrations of his flexibility, ends up naked, curled up in the center of the bed, and waiting. For Erik. For whatever Erik’s going to ask him to do.  
  
Erik’s opened one of the drawers, while he was occupied with the previous order. “You said you needed to feel real. To feel…anchored.”  
  
Has he said that out loud? He hadn’t thought so; but it’s possible. Or Erik can read his mind.  
  
“You don’t want me to be gentle, right now?” Erik comes back, a glint of metal in one hand. Lifts his chin. “Charles? Talk to me.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles tells him. “Please.”  
  
“I’m not going to hurt you. But…I know you prefer the scarves, the softer…so handcuffs, I think. And these…” Tiny decorative nipple clamps, the expensive ones; Charles hears himself breathe in, at the sight, the promise.  
  
“I like you in metal,” Erik says, and eases him down onto the bed with care that’s at odds with the words and the toys. “It is…my artistic medium, after all. And you…dressed up for me…” He lifts Charles’s arms, positions them where he wants them; Charles goes along willingly, letting the heady languid feeling sink in. He’s Erik’s. That is incontrovertibly, right here and now, true.  
  
“Beautiful,” Erik announces, clicking the cuffs shut. He’s tethered to the headboard; that’s good, he likes that. Being anchored, he thinks again.  
  
The first bite of the clamps is always a shock, though the real pain will come when they’re removed, he knows, when blood rushes back in. Erik watches his face. “Tell me how you’re feeling.”  
  
He finds a smile, for Erik, for that. “Yours. Sir.”  
  
“Mine, yes.” Possessive and assertive; Charles is spreading his legs, unconsciously, before his brain catches up. Shameless, whispers that voice in his head. Slut.  
  
But Erik’s smiling back at him, pleased with him. With the response. So maybe that’s all right. Maybe somehow everything can be.  
  
“You want me.” Still smiling. All those teeth. “You want me to fuck you, Charles? To make you scream?”  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Charles says. “Yes, sir.”  
  
Erik plays with the right clamp. Tugs at it, not hard, but enough to elicit an openmouthed whimper. “Tell me what you want me to do to you.”  
  
“I want your cock,” Charles whispers, obedient, falling under the waves without protest. That sensation he’s never had with anyone else: the certainty that Erik won’t let him drown. “I want to feel you come, inside me. I want you to—to make me feel it. You. After. Anything you want—”  
  
“Good.” Erik kneels over him, over his face; Charles knows what he wants, opens his mouth. “You want me inside you? I get to choose where. Here, first. And then I’ll fuck you. If you earn it.”  
  
He can’t hold back the gasp, or the jerk of his hips, at that. His own cock’s rock-hard and curving up against his stomach, and he can feel himself growing wet with need. Erik, plainly, notices. “You want me to say those things to you? To tell you…what you’re allowed to have?” There’s another emotion, though, in the mint-green color of those eyes. Erik checking, concerned, that this is okay, that they’re all right, that they’re together.  
  
He nods again, and licks at Erik’s arousal, hoping that’s enough of an answer. He’s not certain he can talk.  
  
“Good,” Erik breathes, and it’s praise for him, but it’s also affirmation. They are good. And this will work.  
  
Erik pushes forward, inexorable and huge. It’s an awkward position, and that length fills his mouth, his throat, makes him choke and fight for air. It’s raw and messy and he’ll be sore after, and it’s glorious.  
  
One of Erik’s hands fastens in his hair, holds him in place. And then Erik fucks him that way.  
  
At first he tries for technique, the practiced arts he knows, what he’s good at; Erik doesn’t let up, though, and he’s growing lightheaded from desire, from the strain, from the lack of air, only permitted what he can gulp in around that girth. He stops trying after a while, and simply takes, everything Erik gives him, thrusts that bruise his throat and keep him deliriously full, completely claimed and overcome and delighting in it.  
  
Erik pulls back; Charles moans faintly, that cock resting over his lips, sticky, smearing him with it. “I want to be inside you. When I—I want you to feel me. So you know this is real.”  
  
And Charles sighs, and whispers, “Erik,” word floating past his lips without conscious volition; Erik smiles again, and slips a hand between his legs, fingering, making him open.  
  
He’s already relaxed, drifting in a kind of sensual haze, still feeling the ache when he swallows. So he doesn’t notice, initially, that it’s two fingers, and then three, and Erik’s pausing to gaze at him wide-eyed, persona slipping. “Charles—”  
  
“Mmm,” he says back, and lifts his hips, rocking up into Erik’s hand, enjoying the frisson of rippling pleasure. “Fuck me, sir.”  
  
Erik mutters some words that’re probably obscenities, in various languages, and then says, emphatically, “ _Yes_ ,” and moves.  
  
There’s no real lube other than what’s left from his own mouth and Erik’s readiness, but they’d been sloppy and wet and he’s very open where Erik’s been patiently coaxing that muscle to give way. The discomfort is present, but it adds to the sweetness, sharper sensation that throws the brilliance into clearer relief.  
  
Erik’s panting his name, moving inside him; Charles moves with him, meeting him, and one of Erik’s hands tugs on the left clamp, over his sore nipple, and when he moans, head falling back, Erik’s mouth finds his throat, the delicate skin over his collarbone, biting and sucking and stroking with that tongue. And at the same time that splendid long hardness pushes in deeper, more forcefully, and Charles cries out as the orgasm hits, too sudden to stop, tumbling into ecstasy even as he frantically struggles not to, Erik hasn’t said he can—  
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Erik gasps, into his neck, “yes, like that, with me—” and then is there too, body tensing with it, eruption of fluid spilling deep inside him, and that knocks away any hope he’d ever had of holding back, and he lets himself fall into the flood.  
  
Erik kisses him, in the aftermath, light astonished trailing brushes of lips that roam over his face, his stomach, his taut arms, his chest. Charles shivers at each one, uncoordinated, unthinking, only feeling, and awash with it. Erik’s hand explores his wrists, where he can’t see but can tell that there’re red marks, souvenirs of skin tugging against metal; the fingers pause, a wordless question, and Charles shakes his head, closes his eyes.  
  
Erik toys with his cock, which twitches and fills again, enjoying the attention; eyes still shut, he hears the smile in that low murmuring voice. “I thought, the first time I saw you…you looked so young, and lovely, and not innocent at all, no, you’d be trouble, Charles, if you looked at everyone with those eyes, the way you looked at me…and you’d enjoy it.” The other hand traces a circle around his tortured nipple, gradually.  
  
“I told you I didn’t sleep with underage children, and I don’t, and I wanted to fuck you so very badly, to see you on your knees for me, that mouth on my cock…I wanted to have you in my bed, and I hated myself for it, just a little. And then you told me I could have you. I could have everything, could do everything, with you…”  
  
Erik leans down. Whispers, breath hot against his ear, “I want to do a great many things with you,” and Charles shudders helplessly, body alight.  
  
“And you’ll enjoy it all. Won’t you.” Not a question. “Mine, Charles. So wet from me, and you want more…you _are_ my escort, after all. Or you were. Here to be fucked, to be taken, to be used the way you want me to use you…”  
  
Yes. Yes yes yes. And he can’t think, now, all thought vanishing in the words, the sensations. Erik’s fingers explore his chest, where every brush of skin on skin tingles and scorches throughout his being. And then, quietly, scene on hold for a brief ellipsis of time, that voice says in his ear, “I think that’s enough, with these, I told you I’m not going to hurt you,” and there’s a flick of metal, and he hears his own rough sob as the sensation rushes back, the agony of release, the soreness that’s so unbearably delicious.  
  
“Shh,” Erik whispers, steadying; and then kisses him, right there, tongue caressing the aching places, and Charles groans and gives in, the waves of pleasure and pain indistinguishable now, rolling through him.  
  
Erik bites at his other nipple, eliciting another cry; pulls back, and as he does the stubble along his face, the beginnings of artistic scruffiness, scrapes over tender flesh, and Charles inhales sharply and jerks against the handcuffs.  
  
“Hmm,” Erik observes, a low rumble against his chest, and does it again. Charles whines, high-pitched and involuntary, and writhes, and tries to part his legs even more. “Please, please—”  
  
“You like that? You like the way it feels, when I’m rough with you…” Erik slides lower. Puts his mouth on Charles’s inner thigh. Bites, not enough to break skin, but hard, sucking, determined to leave a bruise. Charles sobs and swears and begs, feeling his body tighten, his hole clench, obscene and wet.  
  
“Erik—”  
  
“Should I fuck you again? Like this?” Erik runs a hand over the mark, after. Charles moans, in a voice that doesn’t sound like his.  
  
Erik slips a finger, now slick with something else—oil, maybe, or the contents of one of the bottles of lube—into him. It goes in too swiftly, through all the messiness, the stretch, the looseness; he whimpers, feeling naked, exposed, debauched, dirty. Closes his eyes. He’s an escort, a whore, he’s desperate, he’s got Erik’s climax and lube dripping out of him, over Erik’s hand—  
  
“Shh,” Erik breathes, and fits another finger in—no, three, no, _four_ , god. “Do you want more? Could you take my whole hand, Charles? If I put it inside you, slowly? Inch by inch, you so open for me, begging me for it…I wish you could see yourself.” The fingers stroke and curl and tease, finding that hard electric nub inside him, rubbing, and his whole body goes blank and bright with need.  
  
There’s movement, repositioning, and more pressure, blunt and huge; his cock throbs, swollen and heavy in a kind of far-off way, between his legs. His hips twitch, helplessly; Erik’s other hand steadies him.  
  
“More, I think…” More slickness, oil, easing the way. It hurts, it _hurts_ , but in that perfect way, inexorable widening of himself, inevitable capitulation. His head falls back against the pillows. He might be about to pass out; he can’t really think, overtaken by the pleasure, the invasion, the anguish.  
  
One more push, and the widest part of Erik’s hand—he thinks; he can’t really tell—pops inside him, with a wet slick noise. He hears himself groan; feels the fullness, the shape of Erik’s fist, deep in his body, and everything he is becomes concentrated around that point, trembling, yielding, claimed and surrendered. His muscles clench, unbidden, helplessly trying to push out the intruder, but they’re overrun, and give up the fight.  
  
Erik does _something_ , some motion, and Charles screams, a ragged sound from deep in his throat. “Erik—”  
  
“Shh,” Erik whispers again, and takes his cock into the other hand, fondling him until the arousal—fading slightly from the pain—returns, thick and intoxicating, drugging all his senses with euphoria. “I want you to come for me. Like this.”  
  
Fingers dance over his overstimulated skin, and Charles, given permission, wails softly and collapses into the white heat, letting it take him, feeling the spurts of fluid as almost an afterthought, secondary to the lightwaves inside him, carrying him away.  
  
Dimly, he feels Erik’s arm slide back and out, leaving him hollow and spread wide. Erik’s cock pushes into him; or not entirely into him, just rubbing over the entrance, while that deprived space quivers and wants.  
  
“I’m going to come,” Erik tells him, “like this, on you,” and Charles sobs, not processing, and Erik pushes his legs up until he’s nearly bent in half, until he can see the length of Erik’s cock resting between his thighs when a hand props up his head. “Watch.”  
  
“I _can’t_ —”  
  
“Yes. You can.” Erik’s stroking himself with that hand, the one that’s just been inside him, god, shining and sticky with it; Charles watches, through the ecstatic haze, because Erik’s told him to, because he can’t look away, that’s himself, on Erik’s skin…  
  
Erik’s panting, little gasps as he works himself, hand sliding up and down. “Close—you’re watching—”  
  
“Yes—yes, please, yes—” Babbling. Words falling from his mouth, incoherent. “Yes, sir, please, come on me, in me, there, _there_ —”  
  
“Oh, fuck,” Erik gasps, “ _Charles_ ,” and then he’s coming, hot jets of white that land on that stretched-out gaping hole, on Charles’s cock, his hips, his stomach. Charles’s body gives one last shudder, exquisite and exhausted, and then gives up, and he’s only semi-conscious when Erik falls on top of him and gathers him close.  
  
“Charles. _Charles_. Talk to me.”  
  
All he can offer is a wordless sound, but that seems to be enough; Erik’s arm, the other one, slips beneath him and keeps him protected. “You’re all right. You’re here, you’re real, you’re mine, you’re all right. Yes?”  
  
He nods, and lets Erik hold him. He shouldn’t, shouldn’t need the support, should be sitting up and smiling and saying he’s fine, thank you, we’ll do it again sometime, give us a call…  
  
He lets his head rest on Erik’s arm.  
  
Erik gets him up, after a while, and into the bathroom; runs an actual bath, and eases him into it, where the hot water can soothe away the weariness and the aches. He tips his head back against the tile, and allows all of the ministrations, artist’s hands skillfully cleaning him, massaging his legs, washing sweat from his hair.  
  
Erik tucks him into the bed, and conjures up that first-aid kit; Charles, drifting, wakes up to the cool pressure of wrappings around his ankle, a pillow under his foot. He opens his mouth; the hands pause. “Too tight?”  
  
“No…”  
  
“Better?” Not only the ankle; that’s implied, in that inflection.  
  
“I…yes. Better. Tired, though.” All true.  
  
Erik nods, and doesn’t push for answers, not then. Only finishes with the bandages, and tugs covers up around him, and takes his hand, playing carefully but assertively with his fingers, connecting freckles, exploring joints, tracing patterns over skin.  
                                    
They don’t leave the room. Erik runs downstairs to collect bread and meat and cheese from one of the shopping bags; comes back up and flips on the television while Charles drowses, stomach full, head on his chest. The next time he wakes up Erik’s made tea, evidently not too long before, and is holding him with one arm and one leg, spoon-fashion, while using Charles’s shoulder and a piece of paper as a makeshift sketchpad.  
  
“What’re you doing?”  
  
“I had an idea.” Erik draws a swooping line; it reverberates through the paper and into his skin. “A sculpture. You were very asleep. I didn’t think you’d mind.”  
  
“Can I see?”  
  
A momentary pause; then the paper appears in front of him.  
  
It’s them.  
  
It’s not really them, of course. Erik works in abstract shapes, lines, tangles of metal. But these billows and curves speak of joy. Of flight. Rapturous discovery, two streaks of light winding round and round each other, reaching for the sun.  
  
He has to swallow twice before he can get his throat unstuck. “It’s lovely.”  
  
“No art critique?” Proud, teasing, nervous; Erik the creator. “From you? The person who introduced himself to me by commenting on my exhibit?”  
  
“No critique.” He twists around to meet those wide winter-hearth eyes. “And it got your attention. It’s about freedom, isn’t it?”  
  
“It’s…”  
  
“About being free to be happy,” he clarifies, and sees the change in Erik’s expression. “Together.”  
  
Erik’s gazing at him as if he’s never seen him before. Charles flushes under all the reverence, and wriggles around until they’re face to face, and then leans forward and bites Erik’s chin, just because.  
  
“Hey,” Erik says, but he’s laughing. So’re the eyes. “You ought to be tired.”  
  
“I’m insatiable. And you’ve let me sleep for—” He checks the clock. “—six hours. Good god.”  
  
“Did you have somewhere to be?”  
  
“Only here.” And then he feels himself freeze, with shock. Here? The rain splashes back into existence, clouds reopening like old wounds, overhead.  
  
“Charles?” Concerned; even the sketch radiates it, wobbling worriedly when Erik sets it on the bedside table. “What—was it something I said? Are you—”  
  
“Here,” Charles says again. “I want to be here. With you.”  
  
“I’m…glad?”  
  
“So am I,” Charles says, “very glad. Will you fuck me again?”  
  
“Aren’t you sore?” Erik runs a hand over his hip, proprietary. “My lovely little submissive. You’re a surprise, you know.”  
  
“Am I?” He blinks. “I mean. Both. I never—I haven’t thought about it—I mean I have, but—”  
  
“You are, aren’t you?” Erik pets him again. “I’ve never done this before either. But I know the words. You don’t? Or is it that you don’t want me to say it?”  
  
He considers this. Puts his hand on top of Erik’s, then under Erik’s; Erik squeezes his fingers. “You can say it.”  
  
“Why haven’t you?” It’s a sincere question; there’s a thumb rubbing over his inner thigh, though, and that’s distracting.  
  
“I…think I’ve never…” He stops. Breathes, for a while. Admits the truth. “I’ve never felt like this with anyone else.”  
  
Erik’s hand pauses, then resumes. “Makes two of us.”  
  
“Oh,” he says, and when he looks up those eyes meet his, warm in the misty grey afternoon.

Erik puts him on his back, this time. Finds the silkiest of the ropes in the drawer, and ties him down, wrists and the one uninjured ankle; Charles makes a sound of protest at the extra solicitousness, and Erik shakes his head and says “No,” in a tone that forbids argument. “I told you. We’re not going to hurt you.”  
  
And then proceeds to tease him until his cock’s dripping and his balls ache, drawn up and yearning for release; tells him again, clearly, “No,” at the first sign of liquid, beading up eagerly. He whimpers; Erik cleans away the drops with the heel of a thumb, as Charles frets and sobs and whines. Says “No,” once more, and stops touching him at all. “Be good. For me.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles gasps, because maybe Erik will touch him again, “yes, sir—” And Erik grins, happy and feral. “My submissive. Say it.”  
  
“Yours—”  
  
“Not what I asked.” A light slap to the side of his face; this makes him moan, the tears spilling free now. Erik pauses, fingers lifting his chin. Charles nods back, meeting his eyes: still fine.  
  
“All right. Say it.”  
  
“Yours,” he whispers. “Your submissive. Erik—”  
  
“Good.” As a reward, Erik strokes his cock, one slow caress. Charles sighs, as the event horizon approaches, that tremulous tipping-over he’s only felt with those hands, with Erik, at Erik’s command.  
  
“Like artwork,” Erik murmurs. “Something classical. In bronze. And gold. I could decorate you with gold…”  
  
Charles shuts his eyes and shivers.  
  
Erik fucks him with his hands still tied, so he can’t reach out in return; fucks him slowly, drawing it out, until he’s lost in the exquisite torment of it, needing so very badly, and never wanting it to end. Erik finds release inside him, filling him up with it, leaving him quivering on the edge, ordered not to follow.  
  
Erik gets up. Comes back with one of the vibrators, a thick curved heavy one. “Still no. Not until I say.” And then proceeds to fuck him all over again, using the slick of that orgasm for lube, claiming him so thoroughly that Charles can only submit, and, yes, gladly so.  
  
The assault becomes too much at last, the vibrations too high, buzzing right there over that agonizing sweet spot, and he sobs and lifts his hips, mindlessly pushing back, rubbing himself against it over and over, there, _there_ , and Erik pulls the vibrator back and Charles cries out in abandoned frustration, and Erik says, “Yes, now,” and puts it back inside him and pushes, and he climaxes in long spurts, the heat of it splashing his chest, his stomach, his thighs.  
  
Erik leaves the vibrator inside him, playing with the controls: higher, lower, almost off, at random intervals. Makes him come again, and then again. Charles screams so loudly at one point that he stops, and puts a hand on the ropes, over one wrist.  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“Too much?”  
  
“No…not yet…”  
  
“Nearly?” Erik leans down to kiss him, with conviction. “Should I untie you?”  
  
“N-no…”  
  
“Even you have limits.” Erik kisses the tip of his nose, which might be one of the few unsticky parts of him. “Tell me when we get there.”  
  
“…almost,” Charles says, after a moment. Matching honesty with his own. “One more. Something…”  
  
“…more?” Thoughtful, now. “You have whips. The canes. I saw them. But…not now, I think.”  
  
“The whips,” Charles whispers, an truthful burst of confession, “I don’t mind them, but I—I’ve never liked the—the metal-tipped ones, they’re too sharp—”  
  
“We’ll throw those out.” No room for argument. “Anything else?”  
  
“I want your hands on me.”  
  
“Hmm.” Erik considers him, spread out and sweat-damp and tied down. “You did scream…would you object to…”  
  
“Being gagged? No.”  
  
“Good, but not what I was thinking. How far do you trust me?”  
  
“With everything,” Charles says, instantly. No reservations. Erik takes a breath; gazes at him.  
  
“Then…may I…” One hand settles around his throat, thumb coming to rest over his windpipe. Not pushing.  
  
Charles nods.  
  
Erik murmurs something in German, awestruck; then, fervently, “May I fuck you while I do it?”  
  
He swallows. Feels the weight, with the motion. “Yes. Please.”  
  
Erik sits up and reaches down and slides the vibrator out of him, pausing to rub it along his oversensitive cock; Charles sobs, a fleeting sound of desire, as it smears their slickness over him, lube and Erik’s orgasm, drawn out from inside his body, and he feels that wet ring of muscle between his legs twitch and stir, lonely with the momentary emptiness. More wetness trickles down his thighs; he shuts his eyes.  
  
“Don’t,” Erik breathes, “I want to see you,” and then moves, all that lean weight pressing him down, atop him, well-honed muscles put to good use. He waits until Charles has opened both eyes, though, and then that cock’s nudging at his entrance, where it slips in easily.  
  
One long thrust, and Erik’s seated inside him; Charles moans, hazy with the sensation, that iron length fulfilling him right where he’s needed it the most, hollow and yearning, and Erik says his name, panting, and pulls back and thrusts again, harder, and his eyes want to drift shut but Erik’s asked him to look, so he does.  
  
Erik’s face is tight, as if he’s in pain; but his eyes are filled with something akin to wonder. “Charles—” A headshake; that first hand comes back up to his throat, where, slowly, it’s joined by the other. “Still yes?”  
  
He nods again. Shapes the yes with lips, with eyes, with certainty.  
  
Those large hands tighten, gradually. At first it’s merely inconvenient, the pressure enough to interfere with but not stop his breathing; Erik watches his face, and the grip strengthens. Erik’s very strong, Charles thinks distantly, almost disconnected from his body, the sensation too overwhelming to be centered any single place. Pleasure ripples between those points, Erik’s cock in his ass and Erik’s hands on his throat: he’s Erik’s completely, entirely, holding nothing back.  
  
Erik’s whispering softly, endearments, words of praise, filthy and tender; god and yes and Charles’s name, and the words fall into his ears like extra drops in the waves of shuddering bliss. Bright sparkles dance behind his eyes, now, and when he tries to inhale he can’t, and his body responds without his input, jerking, struggling. The movement pushes Erik’s cock deeper into his body; Erik must take this as encouragement, and moves in turn, plunging in and out and back into him, and the world spins, alive and humming and vivid, each stroke of skin on skin unbearably heightened, drawn out to relentless lengths.  
  
“Charles,” Erik’s saying, “Charles, you’re beautiful, you’re perfect, I can’t—” and the thrusts come harder, more uneven, Erik on the brink of losing control. The world’s shimmering to grey around the edges, his brain screaming from the lack of oxygen; but he can see Erik’s face, the desire in those eyes, for him; can feel the searing heat of Erik’s cock, pounding into his body. And he knows Erik means it, at this moment; knows that truth throughout every atom of his being, seared into him like the pleasure, scorched into his bones, tattooed on his heart and soul.  
  
Erik’s hips slam into him and Erik’s cock drives into that spot and the world snaps into a perfect alignment of ecstasy, climax that turns him inside out and laid bare and shuddering, and he feels Erik’s orgasm as a supernova rippling over that same sparking place, washing through him in glorious languorous tides, less sharply defined but more all-encompassing, or maybe he’s having another orgasm, body convulsing and going limp, again and again, as the sparks consume him…  
  
“Charles,” Erik’s saying, frantic. Hands shaking him, slapping his face, lifting his head. “Charles, god, oh god, please, wake up, please—I didn’t—look at me, Charles, you need to look at me, wake up, _please_ —”  
  
He moans, faintly. His throat feels sore, not exactly from the inside.  
  
Erik’s pleading with him. Afraid; he’s never heard that note in that supple voice before, but he hears it now.  
  
He opens his eyes. Erik’s hand is warm and tangible on his cheek. Erik’s untied his wrists, though not his leg.  
  
Erik stops talking, catches his breath, eyes petrified.  
  
“I’m all right,” Charles tells him, more a lazy exhale of air than any actual words, but Erik seems to get it. “I’m…”  
  
“You’re not.” Erik’s touching him, running a hand through his hair, down over his chest, everywhere except his throat. “You—I couldn’t wake you up. You were—you looked—don’t let me do that again.”  
  
“…again.” He lifts a hand, sets it on Erik’s back, feeling the plane of muscle there. “You said again.”  
  
“No,” Erik says, “no, please. I’ll—other things, Charles, I’ll fuck you if you need that—toys, or the cane, or—oh. Oh, you were asking—”  
  
“You’re still here,” Charles murmurs, and tips his head up to mouth at Erik’s jaw, his neck, his shoulder, uncoordinated messy kisses. Erik slips a hand beneath his head and holds him up, and breathes his own kiss into Charles’s hair. “Of course I am.”  
  
“Untie me?”  
  
“Of course—are you—”  
  
“I am all right.” He reaches up arms, after; Erik pulls him close and cuddles him into that broad chest like the center of stability in the world. “You said…what you were saying…”  
  
“You heard me?”  
  
“Mmm. I said I needed to feel real. And you…” He taps fingers over Erik’s collarbone. One, two, three. “You did that. For me.”  
  
“That was…”  
  
“You were. Yes.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, and kisses him, lips to the top of his head. “Rest. Please.”  
  
He nods; but he can’t sleep. Erik’s touching him, lightly, all over, hands stroking his body, sides, back, thighs, as if wanting to be certain he’s all here. He is exhausted, but the caresses feel good, transcendent calm after the tempest. Erik kisses him more, trailing light brushes of comfort at the corner of his eye, his nose, his ear, and Charles sighs and stretches a leg out and tucks it up again, settles back into the diffuse lingering afterglow.  
  
One of Erik’s wandering hands wanders this time, obviously unthinking, over the unnaturally smooth skin on his hip and thigh, melted by heat; he breathes out, and Erik swallows, and goes to lift the fingers away.  
  
“It was a fire. That one.” The fingers stop.  
  
“In my father’s old laboratory. I was—oh, maybe thirteen—I was hiding from Cain. My stepbrother. Didn’t work; he found me. But he only managed to hit me once, and then the whole place went up. It was deliberately set—my stepfather worked with my father, and he wanted to hide the evidence, you understand, investigations were being made—but he’d not counted on anyone being there.”  
  
Erik’s very quiet. But the coiled set of those muscles suggests vast unspoken comment.  
  
Charles rubs the heel of his thumb over Erik’s nipple, idly, because it’s there, within reach. Erik makes a small sound. “He saved me. My stepfather. He got us both out. The one good thing he ever did. And he told  me, when he was dying, that he’d not particularly meant to grab me. But he did, so I suppose I’m grateful.”  
  
“ _Charles_ ,” Erik says.  
  
He reaches over, finds Erik’s hand, lifts it to his elbow. “Kurt—my stepfather, sorry—broke my arm, one year. No real reason. I think I said something that made him angry. I did that rather a lot.”  
  
“Your mother—”  
  
“My mother stopped caring about much of anything even before my father shot himself.” He doesn’t tell Erik that he’d been there. That he’d been walking into the office for his scheduled session, because if he didn’t the rest of the children would bear the subsequent irritation, and his father had looked up at him and said “Oh, you’re here,” and pulled the trigger.  
  
Some things are best left untold. That one, no one else has ever heard.  
  
“She married Kurt because he worked with my father, because there were going to be investigations of misconduct, because she thought he could cover it up, because…I don’t know. I never knew.” He shrugs. Erik walks the hand to his back, flattens it over his spine. “This one?”  
  
“Cain pushed me down the stairs. Needed three operations to avoid paralysis. I was young, though, I recovered.”  
  
The hand tenses. Then eases, Erik forcing himself into calm. “Are you all right?”  
  
“With you? Yes.”  
  
Erik hesitates. Seems to be making up his mind. Then brushes the hair back from Charles’s temple, gently. Skims a fingertip over the rough spot, electrode-sized.  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, and shuts his eyes. “I—that one, those, those were my father’s.”  
  
Erik says something absolutely obscene, and wraps his arms around Charles’s back, and holds on, fiercely.  
  
“You said you believed me. When I told you—when you came back—what he did. To us.”  
  
“I do.” Erik rubs his back, finding a knot behind his shoulder, easing away tension. “You said he…killed her. Your sister.”  
  
“I never knew—I didn’t even remember I had a twin. I don’t—it still hurts, sometimes. My head. But I never knew there were memories I didn’t have, and it’s awful, but I’m almost more angry about that… Does that make sense? Because—”  
  
“It makes sense. You get headaches?”  
  
“Sometimes… He was running some sort of test on us. When it happened. I couldn’t find the details. I woke up from it. She didn’t.”  
  
“What are you going to do?”  
  
“I don’t know.” There’s not really anything left to be done. Everyone’s gone. Everyone’s gone except him. And this house. And the rain, outside, unending.  
  
“Please stay.” He whispers it to Erik’s chest. Turns his head, so that the scar on that side can rest on that well-muscled warmth. He thinks that maybe he’ll never have a headache again, if he can just remain right there. “Please don’t—please stay.”  
  
“Yes.” Erik cradles him in long arms, in ferocious security. “Charles, I…you know I asked Emma Frost for something. For…you.”  
  
“…me?”  
  
“Exclusivity, I mean. If you—you said I was your first. As an escort. At events, in public. And I was… I don’t want you to see anyone else. I want you to be with me.”  
  
“You…talked to Emma…” Charles stops, thinking hard. “When you were there. Before you came over here.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I mean. Before we even—before we had—you asked for—”  
  
“I knew I wanted you.” Erik strokes a hand through his hair. “She said you were…she said I’d have to ask you. If I wanted you. To be…to be only mine.”  
  
“Yours—”  
  
“I know—I know I don’t have the right to. And if you say no—but if it’s the money, Charles, I swear I’ll pay—I mean I’d give it to you, not pay you, if you’d take it, please—”  
  
“It’s not about money…”  
  
“Then what is it?” Another soft caress, petting; he settles under it. “You don’t…or maybe you don’t want to—I’m sorry, Charles, is it—me?”  
  
“No!” He looks up. “I want you. Believe that, please.”  
  
“Then…”  
  
“I don’t know if I can…I’ve never been good at…” He laughs, helplessly. “Relationships. Oh, god. Erik. There is something I should tell you.”  
  
“Relationships—” Erik’s expression changes again. “Charles, are we—”  
  
“I think so,” Charles says, and laughs again. “I mean…if you want that, I do, I _do_ , Erik, I—”  
  
“Oh fuck yes,” Erik announces, and kisses him hard, proprietary. His. Charles likes it.  
  
“I really should tell you,” he tries again, later, after Erik’s left him boneless and relaxed and sated and propped up by pillows. “Other things…I have a sister. An adopted sister, I mean. Her name’s Raven. She lives in California; I think you’d like her…”  
  
“Adopted?”  
  
“She wasn’t part of my father’s…project. She turned up at our door…in the kitchen, actually, stealing food…I went to my father, because I didn’t know what else to do, and said that unless we could adopt her and help her, I’d stop cooperating in his experiments. Skew the data. Whatever I could do to make it come out wrong.”  
  
“Of course you did.” That’s not condescending; it’s also not surprised, as if Erik’s ceased being taken aback by Charles’s stubbornness. “I take it he listened?”  
  
“Actually, no. He told me that I’d cooperate regardless, because if I didn’t he’d take it out on one of the younger children, just someone he picked at random for extra tests, but that he’d sign the adoption papers anyway, because he honestly didn’t care what I did with my free time and if I wanted a pet I could have one.”  
  
Erik stares at him, shocked.  
  
“She ran away,” Charles explains. “Years later, mind you. After the stair incident, after she knew I’d recover…that was it, for her. She tried to get me to go with her; the experiments were over, after my father died. But I couldn’t.”  
  
“The other children,” Erik guesses, correctly. Charles nods. “If I left, I’d be cut off. The money, the trust fund, all of it…They’d been sent away. Covered up. I was trying to find them. To help them. I needed money, to do that.”  
  
“Is _that_ why you work for—” Erik cuts himself off. “Not important. Go on.”  
  
“Pretty much it.” He shrugs, one-shouldered. “She told me that she couldn’t watch me be a martyr, that she needed to build a life for herself, and I said it was her choice, and so she left. I do call her. I called her this morning—is that yesterday, now?—about…what I found. Cassandra.” He has to laugh. “I did have a sister. All along.”  
  
“You…” Erik shakes his head. “When I first saw you I thought you’d be—well. Different. Entitled. Spoiled by wealth. Charles, I’m so sorry. If I could—if I can help you—anything, anything at all—”  
  
“Well.” He picks up Erik’s hand. Kisses a finger, lightly. “You weren’t wrong. I’ve never not had money. And my name. So…”  
  
Erik shifts the hand. Touches that scar again. Then the one on the other side, too, both hands and the weight of acceptance, deliberate caresses. “I’m still sorry. What can I do?”  
  
“Nothing, now.” He shuts his eyes. “It’s over. I just need to…” Everything. Sell the company. Smooth over the ways and means he’d used to find his father’s other victims. Leave the Xavier name intact, mostly for his mother’s sake, because she’d bandaged his wounds when he’d been very small, before the alcohol and the pills.  
  
And then what? Move on?  
  
He thinks again about his half-flippant pencil-sketch plan. So glib. Be a prostitute. Sleep with men for money. He’s good at it. Hell, he knows more about himself now than he ever has. Submissive for hire, at your service.  
  
He’s not sure he can.  
  
He is sure that he’ll never feel this way with anyone who isn’t Erik, not ever. Erik knows him better than any other living soul.  
  
What if Erik means every word? What if Erik wants them to be together? To do _what?_ What else is he good for, besides sex?  
  
“Nothing,” Erik echoes, the word a tragedy.  
  
“Oh—no, I didn’t mean that. This is helping. You, holding me.” He manages a smile. It’s too soon to be certain, but he thinks the words might in fact contain something true. “I do like your hands on me.”  
  
“Not again.” Erik touches his lips, though, like a kiss. And there’s a promise in those eyes. “You need to rest. Um…orders. Let me feed you again. Then rest.”  
  
Charles, who _is_ tired, yawns and smiles because Erik likes to see him smile, and because he likes Erik liking that; puts his head down on the pillows, at the command. Sets all the thoughts aside, until morning. Erik’s here. They’re both here, tonight. That’ll be enough for now.


	8. Erik, The Next Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik wakes up and has some thoughts, Sebastian Shaw is an interfering bastard, and the rain is appropriate for the emotions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may need a hug after this one. But there's another chapter coming on Thursday! I promise things'll get better. They may get worse first; but they'll get better.

Erik wakes up in what feels like a nest of clouds; he panics briefly—when has he ever slept in clouds? where the hell is he?—and then remembers whose bed he’s in, and who’s currently curled up beside him, small and warm and freckled and peaceful.   
  
Right. Charles. And Charles’s bed, where he’d also spent the previous night, and had the same precise reaction in the morning.  
  
He supposes he’ll get used to the cloud-like bed, eventually. And then, surprised all over again, he thinks: I’ve just thought about getting used to this. About this being something I can get used to.  
  
The rain, having not ceased in the night, drums contented fingers on the rooftop, on the windowpane, on the pavement below. Charles doesn’t stir, but Erik wriggles a bit closer to him regardless. Wouldn’t want those blue eyes to wake up cold.  
  
His calf brushes fabric that isn’t expensive silk sheets, and he shuts his own eyes, remembering. His hands bandaging Charles’s ankle. Charles on the floor, all pain and distressed freckles, as he came sprinting in. Charles collapsing into his arms, shaking, unable to breathe, attempting to tell him what was wrong—  
  
He can still hardly believe it. He does, because he’s felt the scars, looked into those eyes when the confessions tumbled out, piece by halting piece. But his whole body goes tight and hot at the idea: the cruelty of it, a man who’d experiment on children, on his own son, his daughter; the family who should’ve been there for Charles instead being no family at all.   
  
So many scars. So much hurt; and he wants to find all the responsible bodies and hurt every last one of them in turn, for what they’ve done to the beautiful man sleeping next to him.  
  
Charles might not want that. Charles, who can tell Erik, of all people, that his art is inspirational.  
  
Charles, who’d begged Erik to tie him down and fuck him and put hands on his throat, to make him feel real and present and alive.   
  
He’d tried. He’d tried as best he knows how. And he’ll keep trying, if Charles will let him; he thinks, looking at that compact shape settled alongside his, one hand on Erik’s waist as if trying to hold on through dreams, that maybe Charles will.  
  
He’d told Charles that he’d never done this before, with anyone else; that’s true. Not like this. Nothing like this.  
  
He knows about the dynamic, of course, about the desires; he’s watched porn, and he’s well aware of what he likes, and even before that, Sebastian’d had—not friends, no, Sebastian didn’t have friends. Acquaintances, who were far more into the scene. Who’d invited them out, once; after, laughing, Sebastian’d asked Erik to lie over his lap and be spanked.  
  
Even as a teenager, looking into those eyes, he’d understood that it wasn’t really a request.  
  
He’d done it, and he hadn’t even been able to hate himself for it, not when Sebastian, feeling generous, had paid extra for his next piece, money that he could use for his mother’s treatments, for a dinner out, for a bouquet of sunflowers, cheerful and vibrant, by her bedside.  
  
He’d cast them in bronze, later. So she’d have them forever.  
  
He wonders whether, if Charles asked, he’d be ready to try being in that position again. He suspects he would. He trusts Charles not to hurt him; it might be worth the offer, for those blue eyes to understand the depth of his commitment, what he’s willing to offer. And Charles is, incontrovertibly, not Sebastian.  
  
But that’s not what Charles needs from him. Not really.   
  
And he’s loving their dynamic, if he’s honest with himself, and he often is brutally honest with himself; not so much the act of command on its own, but the way that liquid-sapphire eyes gaze at him _with_ the command, wide with unhesitating faith and pure acceptance of their roles.   
  
It’s never been like this with anyone else, that tea-and-crumpets accent had admitted, soft-voiced and true. And Erik believes that. Believes the wondering heartbreaking joy in blue eyes at the peak, and after, when Erik touches him, cares for him, holds him through the shivering.  
  
Charles is complicated in ways that might take a lifetime to comprehend, complexly layered secrets and pain and compassion and an unbreakable capacity for trust, at least in Erik, even now; Charles has given him everything, all those confessions, honesty in bed, the beats of that heart, even the breath in his lungs.  
  
He finds himself breathless, too, watching Charles sleep beside him. Honored. Grateful. In awe.  
  
He wants this to be good, for Charles. Wants to be the person who can push and pull and carry him over that edge, to keep him safe when he needs to fall apart, and to put him back together, with care.   
  
He wants more. And maybe he’s a selfish bastard, but he wants it all. All of that; all of Charles, in silk ropes and handcuffs and Erik’s marks for decoration, on that firework-freckle skin.  
  
He’s been working mostly on instinct. Instinct, and what he vaguely remembers, and what Charles has mentioned enjoying. He generally trusts his instincts, and they’ve seemed to be good ones so far, but at some point his guesses will likely run out. Maybe he should do research. Maybe he should ask Charles about some of the other toys. He could request demonstrations. Could make it an order.  
  
His fingertips tingle, remembering. All that sensation. Charles’s throat under his hands.   
  
Not again, he’d said. He’d not meant not _ever_ —that moment’d been like nothing he’d ever felt, before or since, and he _knows_ that’s true for Charles as well—but not like that. Not so desperate, so reckless, so wild. They’ll have to be careful.   
  
He’ll have to be careful; it’ll be easy, he understands, for Charles to give the yes, to push those limits, to say go on when the answer should be stop.  
  
Research, he considers again. Safewords, perhaps. Not only for Charles to use, though they’ll likely have to have that discussion, about Charles trusting him enough to use them. He can make that one an order, too, if it’ll help. But the words will be for him as well. A safety net for them both, to stop the fall, if it comes. To catch them and keep them together.  
  
There’s a crackle of thunder, static in the chilly air; Charles flinches in his sleep, and Erik wraps the other arm around him in response. Wonders whether he’s hearing the boom and crash, in dreams; wonders whether that’s a headache, beginning behind those closed eyelids, unmoving eyelashes. He can’t see the scars, not under all that energetic hair, but he knows how they feel beneath his fingertips, knows where they are.  
  
Charles, he thinks. Himself and Charles. Astonishing. And _right_.  
  
He might even end up appreciating the cloud-like bed.  
  
His mobile phone chirps at him, morning irritation, from the floor.  
  
He scowls at it. It takes no notice. Chirps again.  
  
“Hush.”   
  
Charles is sleeping. Charles needs to rest.  
  
Chirp! announces the phone.  
  
“I mean it,” Erik mutters, and glances around for a spare pillow. “Silence. Or I will use you for spare found-object sculpture parts.”  
  
“…Erik?”  
  
“What—Charles, go back to sleep!”  
  
“Were you…talking to someone?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Is that your phone?” Blinking drowsy hair out of those eyes, half-awake. “You can answer, go on…”  
  
“I don’t want to.”  
  
“It might be important,” Charles yawns, and nestles back into pillows. “Commissions…”  
  
That might in fact be the case. He’s got several potential patrons who’ve promised to call. “…fine. Don’t move.”  
  
He makes a lunge for the phone. Scoops it off the floor; returns to appropriate cuddling position. The rain applauds his agility.  
  
And then the contentment, the comfort, the coziness, even the laughing rain, all fade to grey. It’s Sebastian.  
  
Charles has, evidently, drifted off again, or at least his eyes’re closed and he’s breathing steadily into Erik’s shoulder. Good; he needs to recover. Doesn’t need to see this.  
  
 _So you’re fucking Charles Xavier,_ proclaims the text message. _Clever of you, pet, making sure I’d see the pictures._  
  
The pictures? What—oh. Oh, no, last week’s exhibition, the publicity photos, where he’d had Charles parade around with him, and he’d been thinking at the time that, yes, this would come to certain people’s attention—  
  
He stares at the unsympathetic screen. The next message says, _Well done, by the way. Though a bit surprising considering how we always felt about the parasites of society. Or are you using him for the money?_  
  
What money? Yes, Charles seems relatively stable, has this house, mentioned something in the midst of all the admissions, words about never having not had money, but Charles works as a prostitute, if a rather specialized one. Sebastian must know that.  
  
He ignores those messages. He doesn’t want to respond. This isn’t right. Sebastian’s not allowed to be here, in this bed, with the two of them.  
  
Charles sighs, in his sleep, and pushes his face more deeply into Erik’s chest.  
  
The screen lights up again. _Is_ _it the extensive sexual repertoire or the extent of his finances? I’m curious._  
  
Clearly ignoring the problem isn’t going to work.  
  
 _Fuck off._  
  
 _Ah, you are there. How’s life as an Xavier lapdog?_  
  
 _We’re not on speaking terms, Sebastian. Go away._  
  
 _Did he get you into bed with his tongue, or his trust fund?_  
  
 _He doesn’t have a trust fund. I’m throwing this phone out the window._  
  
There’s a delay, during which Erik allows himself to hope that his horrible ex-lover has simply given up; and then the phone tells him he has email.   
  
Of course. As if anything with Sebastian will ever be simple. As if anything with the person who’d been his first, his mentor, the person who’d stolen his art and paid to help keep his mother alive, will ever be.  
  
It’s a file. He can’t not look.  
  
It’s the most recent financial statements for the Xavier Corporation. Stock prices. Estimated earnings. Net worth.   
  
It’s a staggering amount.  
  
The second page is an estimation of the family’s personal worth, at this particular snapshot in time, investments and properties and company shares. That’s even more staggering. And Charles’s name is on every last document.  
  
Charles Francis Xavier, heir to half the wealth of New York, if not more.  
  
He lies there gazing at it as if the information’ll change or shift or make sense somehow before his eyes.  
  
Sebastian, likely sensing that his work can speak for itself, stays quiet.   
  
The drumming of the rain increases. A faster tempo. Harder. Malevolent.  
  
He rolls out of bed, slowly. Says, “Breakfast,” when Charles makes a small deprived noise; this seems to be an acceptable explanation, because there’s no further protest.  
  
He pulls on his jeans and the first shirt he finds and makes his way down, mechanically, to the kitchen. The phone, with that damning display, comes along.  
  
He’d been thinking eggs, and toast, and, yes, crunchy bacon; had bought everything yesterday before he’d returned, thinking he’d surprise those ocean-tide eyes into a smile. He gets all the ingredients out, one by one, while staring at the screen. He even makes tea.  
  
After a bit there’s a soft footfall in the doorway. He doesn’t turn around.  
  
“Erik?” Very tentative. “Are you…is everything…”  
  
“You shouldn’t be up.” He pokes at the eggs. “Stay in bed. Rest your ankle.”  
  
“I…couldn’t sleep. Was it bad news?”  
  
“Not exactly. It was unexpected.” He watches Charles cross the room, still hesitant, to collect the tea. Yesterday’s jeans and another one of those grandfatherly sweaters, this one royal blue, nearly the same shade as those eyes. Barefoot, despite the cold.  
  
For some reason it’s that last vulnerability that tips him over the edge. What right does Charles have to look this fragile, to be this careless with himself, to make Erik want to carry him back upstairs and feed him breakfast in bed, when he’s been lying that lovely head off without reservations this entire time?  
  
“My ankle’s fine,” Charles offers, gingerly. “Thank you. For—for everything.”  
  
“Why do you work for Emma Frost, Charles?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You heard me.”  
  
“I…it’s a business arrangement, more or less. I can…take care of her more demanding clients, I’m good at that, and she’s helped me with…finding one or two of the children. Through less legal but more effective means. She doesn’t pay me; I don’t need the money.” Charles looks a bit bewildered, but that blue gaze is honest: he’s telling the truth. This time. It’s driving Erik insane.  
  
“How much money _do_ you have? Rough estimate.”  
  
“Why is this important? Now?”  
  
“It’s important to me. You don’t need the money. You could buy Manhattan. True?”  
  
“Why would I want to buy—”  
  
“True?”  
  
“That’s…mostly true.” Charles’s eyebrows pull together. “But that’s not—where did you hear this? From whom?”  
  
“Does it matter?”  
  
“Well, yes—it’s not _entirely_ the truth—”  
  
“But mostly. You said. Was anything you told me real? Ever? Even that very first night?”  
  
“ _This_ is real.” Cracks in that voice, now. The castle towers undermined and wavering. “Everything I’ve told you—I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told anyone, Erik—”  
  
“But you didn’t tell me who you are.”  
  
There’s a pause, then. Full of cannon-fire fuses.   
  
“You let me think that you work for Emma Frost. That you need—” What? The income, the job, the money? Erik himself? That thought twists inside his chest: is he angry because Charles _doesn’t_ need him? No. He doesn’t need Charles either. Doesn’t need anyone.  
  
“That you need to…do this,” he finishes, a bit lamely but with enough heat to make up the difference. “You could’ve bought all my work at the exhibition. Twice over. Instead you decided to sleep with me. Why, Charles? Is this some sick game you and Emma Frost play? Fun with the clients?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles snaps, shoving the tea away, exasperation and hurt flaring brightly over the oceans, reflecting spark and powder in the blue. “Yes, Erik, that’s been my diabolical plan all along, invite you to my home and sleep with you in my bed and let you put your hands on my throat and have a hysterical breakdown in your arms and that’s part of my _sick game_ —”  
  
“About that. What is it you want, from me? You want me to hurt you? Because I could. I can. But you would like that, wouldn’t you? You’d get off on that?”  
  
“Fuck you,” Charles says, though for just a moment he looks impossibly young, furious and pale and composed, but with a crack in the armor suggesting that blow’s gone home. “I trusted you. And if you’d just listen—I can tell you the rest of it, what I’m planning to do with—”  
  
“You lied,” Erik says, “to me.”   
  
He knows he’s belaboring the point. Knows that if he were a better person, he’d forgive, feel sympathy—Charles has been through hell, literally—and move on.  
  
But the revelation’s too new. And too familiar, shades of Sebastian, of that laughing voice: it’s for your own good, pet, the hurt will make you stronger…  
  
It scores lines across his recently-rediscovered heart. Clawmarks, raw and red.  
  
“I did—” Charles shakes his head. “But I didn’t, I thought—I told you, yesterday, what I—”  
  
“Not all of it.”  
  
“I thought you’d recognized—people do know my name, Erik, I’m sorry, I thought you’d heard of—”  
  
“Not everyone moves in your damn society circles!”  
  
“You want me,” Charles argues, reaching unerringly, unknowingly, for his deadliest arrow. “You want me, and I want you, I thought I could give you—everything—I thought I had, and you—”  
  
“I’ve known you for a week, Charles, when did you think it was fair to throw all your fucked-up issues at me—” Unjust, cruel, too cruel, and he knows it is, can see the damage opening up behind those eyes.  
  
“When you came back,” Charles says, fighting the cruelty with devastating openness. “When you came back, and you held me when I—and you fucked me, the way I needed it, and you kissed me the way I—”  
  
“You need too much!”  
  
Charles goes completely white.   
  
Erik, shocked, thinks for a moment that he might faint; prepares to run forward and catch him, to hold him, something, anything…   
  
He can see the exact second when the switch flips, though. When his last chance is gone.  
  
When Charles straightens those shoulders and the gates come down behind those eyes and that voice says, utterly cool, every bit as arrogant and careless and dismissive as Erik’d once thought he might be, before knowing him, before knowing how he tastes and sounds and shivers in the night, “Then you should leave, shouldn’t you?”  
  
“I—”  
  
“You don’t have to pay me. Or Emma. As you’ve so kindly pointed out, I have a lot of money. I can afford to fuck self-righteous artists for free. On occasion.”  
  
“Charles—”  
  
“Door.” Charles crosses his arms. “Use it.”  
  
“I don’t _want_ to leave—”  
  
“Too bad. You asked me once whether I said no to anything. Now I’m saying I want you out of my house. Would you like me to go up and get your bag, or will you?”  
  
“But,” Erik says. The ground’s suddenly unstable. The righteous foundation of his outrage’s cracked and slid sideways, under his feet. He is still angry, and he’s not wrong to be angry, but he also _feels_ wrong. As if he should be apologizing; as if he’s said or done something unforgivable, unknowing, and the momentousness hangs in the air, the hush before the tidal wave.  
  
He _doesn’t_ want to leave.  
  
But Charles turns and walks away, presumably upstairs, and Erik’s left alone in the kitchen staring at a half-empty mug of tea.  
  
It steams back at him accusingly.  
  
Charles comes back with Erik’s bag, walks past the kitchen, and opens the front door. The rain billows in.  
  
“Wait—” He nearly trips over his own feet, sprinting to catch up. “Charles, I—what are you—”  
  
Charles considers the rain, studies Erik’s bag, eyes the wet world outside, reaches around the corner, holds out an umbrella. “I don’t believe you brought one. Here.” The shove’s powerful and unexpected enough that Erik actually finds himself taking a step back, which ends up being a step out the door. He can’t find words.  
  
“The amusing part is,” Charles says, a self-mocking little twist that isn’t a smile on those lips, “I was thinking, this morning in bed, that if I’d ever believed I knew how to be in love, if I could be in love with anyone, I’d’ve been in love with you.”  
  
Erik stands there openmouthed. In the rain.  
  
“It’s a good thing I don’t believe it,” Charles says, and shuts the door.  
  
He can’t move, for a ridiculously long time. And then he thumps at the door with his fists, shouts, “Charles!” at the panels, kicks the wood when it doesn’t open.   
  
It’s locked.  
  
“Charles, please!”  
  
Nothing. No answer. The rain buckets down. The door’s too damn solid. Old. Weighty as everything else in this house, freighted with leaden memory.  
  
“I’m not leaving!” he shouts, to the unheeding wood. “You can’t say—you can’t just say that and—fuck you, Charles, I didn’t ask for this, you know that!”  
  
No reply to that either. Only a dismal mutter of thunder, overhead.  
  
“Open the damn door!” He knows how to pick locks, but doesn’t have anything with him that’ll work well, not on this gargantuan antique obstacle.  
  
Charles is injured—physically, walking on that twisted ankle—and invisibly, even more so. It’s a good thing I don’t believe it, that voice echoes, in his head, through the rain. Not angry. Resigned, perhaps. Or worse: the sound of utter exhaustion, the soldier laying his guns down, one final time, at the side of the road.  
  
He understands, staring terrified at the door, that he genuinely has no idea what Charles might do.  
  
And he’s not there. He’s out here. In the storm.  
  
“Charles,” he pleads, “open the fucking door, please, please, you let me in once already, you let me in when you never let anyone in and I never said—” Any of it. Everything he’d felt, waking up that morning. How damn lucky he is, how fortunate he is to be the person who’s been here to help, the person Charles has allowed to be here.  
  
And he listened to Sebastian even though he knows better, and he made a choice about which person to trust. And he hurt Charles.  
  
They need to talk. That’s true. But he _wants_ to talk. He can’t just walk away.  
  
He could break one of those windows, but they’re strong, double-glazed, and nested in intricate iron patterns that mimic medieval stained glass. He won’t be able to get in. And he can’t break something else of Charles’s.  
  
He sees that moment again, the instant of impact, and the slamming doors. Literal, that metaphor. Painfully so.  
  
“Charles,” he says, one more time, even though no one’ll hear him but the rain. And then he looks at his bag, the overnight bag he’d flung clothing into at random, hurrying back here to be with Charles; the bag he’d dropped without thinking, coming through the door to Charles’s cry of pain. At the time, he’d left it lying where it’d landed, taking those blue eyes upstairs and trying with all his might to convince them that they might be wanted, desired, safe and sound.  
  
And he sits down, on the damp doormat, next to his bag. Leans his shoulder against the doorframe; lets it prop him up. He’s spent time in worse places. Getting wet won’t kill him. And, eventually, Charles will have to open the door.  
  
Charles will _have_ to. Because Erik will be there. That’s how stories work, isn’t it? Proper narrative arcs and endings? He’ll be here, and Charles will see that, and the rain will stop at some point, and the clouds will go away.  
  
They’ll have to. For Charles. Won’t they?  
  
He tips his head back against the doorframe, too, and listens to the weeping of the rain, and waits for that story to be true.


	9. Charles And Erik

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they talk. And that's a good thing. Also, shared tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, warnings for Charles vaguely briefly contemplating, kind of distantly, self-harm as one option? No acts, only contemplation, and Erik definitely has _opinions_ upon hearing this confession!
> 
> Also apologies that it's a couple of hours later than usual. The Husband came home early, and I've been...away from the laptop. Occupied. Tied up. *grin* Still today, though!

Erik’s gone.   
  
Outside. Out of his life.  
  
The thumping at the door continues for a while, plus some indistinct shouting. Charles ignores it all. It’s only Erik feeling guilty. Erik shouldn’t have to feel guilty; he’s not wrong.  
  
None of those words are wrong. They shouldn’t hurt. And, in fact, they don’t. He’s not feeling much of anything. Only sort of numb.  
  
He almost laughs. That ought to solve one problem, surely: if he’s not feeling anything, he can’t need anything, and then he can hardly be accused of needing too much, can he?  
  
Eventually, if he leaves Erik out there in the rain, Erik will get frustrated with him and give up and go away. It’s not as if Erik wants him any longer; it’s only that Erik’s a decent person and doesn’t want to end this on bad terms, doesn’t want Charles to hate him for speaking the truth. Charles understands that impulse. It’s a nice one.  
  
But he doesn’t hate Erik. He’s not even angry. Only tired, the kind of bone-deep unrelenting tiredness that suggests, slyly, how easy it’d be to just stop thinking and worrying and trying, forever.  
  
He walks back out into the kitchen, where he can’t hear the pounding at the door.  
  
Erik will give up and decide that he’s not worth it and go away, and that’s the way it should be, because Erik’s right, he needs too much and he doesn’t know how to love anyone properly and Erik will be better off gone and angry with him, better than staying here with the nothing Charles has to offer.  
  
The burnt remnants of breakfast’re lying melancholy on the stove. He throws it all out, not being hungry; puts the pans in the sink to soak, picks up his abandoned mug of tea. Erik had made that. For him.  
  
His hand shakes and the mug hits the floor and shatters in an explosion of ceramics and Earl Grey.  
  
He stands there staring at the disaster for a while, until his brain nudges him and says: you should probably do something about that. Being barefoot and all.  
  
He cleans it up, on hands and knees; one of the last shards, as he’s throwing it away, twists vengefully in his grip and slices a clean line over the heel of his hand, down towards his wrist.   
  
He says “Fuck!” out loud, flinches at the sound of his own voice, and watches the blood rise to the surface, as if in a dream.  
  
There’s a thought there. He chooses not to pursue it. Instead, gets out his first-aid supplies _without_ thinking about Erik, and runs his arm under the tap, and wraps the cut in gauze. It’s not that bad. Or he doesn’t think so. It’s a little hard to tell, with the numbness and all.  
  
He puts the kit away and sits on the floor with his back against the solid wood of his bed, arms resting on pulled-up knees, hand distantly throbbing, listening to the rain.  
  
The thoughts sneak back in, coiling and winding around the thunder.   
  
This time, he permits himself to take one out, and unfold it, and examine it, with clinical dispassion. It’s an idea. He’s finished, after all. Nothing left with Erik. Nothing left in this house. He’s found all the children, completed his ridiculous self-imposed quest. Done the best that he can with his father’s legacy.  
  
Said father’s matched set of eighteenth-century dueling pistols have remained on display in the office. He knows precisely where they are. There’s no longer any blood or flesh on the one, of course; it’d been thoroughly cleaned, after.  
  
He can go find them. Open the case. Appreciate the symmetry of it all.  
  
He doesn’t think about that, because if he does he’ll go up to the third floor and take out that case and load the never-used one of the pair and walk out into the field behind the house in the rain and never come back, and he can’t do that, he can’t do that because he’s still sending money to Raven in California, he’s promised support for Hank’s clinic, he’s helping put the Summers brothers through school…  
  
He should make a will, at least. He needs to sell his controlling interest in the corporation. Break it up, to avoid a monopoly. He’ll have to figure that one out, too.  
  
He gazes around the room. How _does_ one dispose of a mansion? Raven won’t want it.  
  
He shuts his eyes and tries to picture the life he’d once imagined for himself in the aftermath: a loft apartment someplace unknown to anyone else, meetings in anonymous hotel rooms with discreetly sadistic strangers, his books and a chessboard and something soft to lie on when he comes home, for the pain.  
  
He’d imagined Erik coming to see him once or twice, when he’d pictured that life, back then.   
  
There are, he thinks again, things he’ll never have.  
  
He wonders whether he’ll ever end a day without the headaches, at his temples, unceasing. Like the rain.  
  
He spends some time pulling all the files out of the office and dragging them downstairs, to the hungry mouth of the fireplace; he doesn’t have a lighter and he can’t find matches, of all things, and he stands there too heart-weary to even swear at himself. No space left to care.  
  
He should probably go to the store. He can buy matches. In the downpour.  
  
He shrugs into his coat and opens the door and Erik’s there.  
  
Sitting on the ground, soaked through, scrambling to his feet and staggering with the wet and the cold. Holding out his hands. “Charles—”  
  
“You’re here,” Charles says, blankly. Here, because Charles tried to throw him out and he wouldn’t go, and he’s standing there drenched with raindrops and saying words, I just needed to see you, I need to know you’re all right, I’ll leave if you want me to but please tell me you’re all right…  
  
“Erik.” Interrupting the torrent. Clumsily. A rock in the stream. “You’re here.”  
  
“I’m…yes?”  
  
“Well,” Charles says, and feels an odd tugging at the corners of his mouth, almost an inclination to smile, “you’d better come in.”  
  
  
  
  
Charles has opened the door.  
  
He almost doesn’t register it at first. He’s sitting there in the cold and the damp, expecting nothing, losing track of time, feeling himself slip into that kind of half-aware fugue in which there’s only the chill of the droplets on his skin and the large looming bulk of the house and the distant hope that this might mean something, somehow, in the end…  
  
And then the door rattles in its frame and jostles him awake and he lurches upward on icicle feet and sees astonished sapphire eyes and tries to say whatever words he can, _I’m sorry_ and _please be all right_ and _thank you_ , because Charles is here and looking at him and alive and not—anything else—and Charles doesn’t say anything, so Erik keeps talking, making every promise he can think of: I’ll leave if you ask me to, I’m not trying to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but just tell me you’re all right, please…  
  
And Charles asks him to come in.  
  
He stands there dripping rainwater, inches taller than those ocean-depth eyes, and manages, “…really?”  
  
Charles makes an expression that almost risks being a smile. “Yes. I mean it. I don’t want you to freeze to death on my front doorstep. Come on.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
No reply. He trails Charles to the kitchen, shedding bits of thunderstorm in his wake. He starts to offer to mop it up; Charles doesn’t turn around, and the words die on his lips.  
  
Charles is dressed to go out. Coat and all. Where?  
  
Charles shrugs out of the coat, though, and throws it over the back of a chair without looking; hands him towels and gets out a mug from the cupboard and pours tea. “Here.”  
  
“…thank you. You—your hand—” He reaches out. Stops himself before his fingers can close on that eloquent wrist. “What—”  
  
“The other mug broke.” An answer that’s not an answer at all: how did it break? When? Was it on purpose? Is that bandage also, and god don’t let it be, don’t let that be true, on purpose? But that tone, all solid iron portcullises and thick English castle walls, forbids further inquiry.  
  
“It was my ex,” he says. “Sebastian Shaw. The one who told me.”  
  
The iron gates wobble, momentarily, in surprise. “You—”  
  
“This morning.” He’s watching those eyes. Trying to read the reaction; trying to apologize. “You asked me where I heard, from whom—I should’ve known better. Sebastian is—he exhibited my art. As his.”   
  
Charles, who understands art, might also understand this; does, evidently, from the widening of those eyes. “Erik—”  
  
“I know you didn’t lie to me. Or—not intentionally. And I…overreacted. I’m sorry.”  
  
Charles swallows. Hard. “What you said—about me, about what I need—no, never mind, you don’t have to apologize. It’s been said before. And you weren’t wrong.”  
  
“Was _that_ what—but I _was_ wrong. You told me as much as you felt safe saying, and I should’ve listened, I know you aren’t—you asked me to stay, you needed—me.” Is that arrogant? Maybe, but Charles replies with that near-smile again. So even if it is, it might also be possibly next-door to all right.   
  
“And I’m glad you did. I’m glad I was there. It was a stupid thing to say, Charles, I’m sorry. I—other people said that? To you?”  
  
“It’s not important.” Charles nudges the untouched tea his direction, with that bandaged hand. “This is for you, you know.”  
  
“It is important. Share it with me?”  
  
That one gets a full smile at last, if fleeting. “The tea?”  
  
“The tea—anything you want. To share. Please.”  
  
Charles looks at the mug, perfectly positioned now between them. “All right…yes…we can do that.”  
  
“We can?”  
  
“I hope so. At least with the tea. Your ex…I’ve heard the name. He had a studio, didn’t he? A few years ago?”  
  
“Yes. He was…he’s…” Difficult to explain. But he owes Charles that. And if they’re maybe potentially going to try to share tea, then Charles should know. Everything. It’s about time they _both_ were honest.  
  
“He was the first one to recognize that I might be a—any kind of artist. He taught me…what he knew. He was—at the time I thought he cared about me. He paid for my mother’s hospital bills, when she got sick. I was sixteen and I was stupid and he told me that I owed him everything. So I…did.”  
  
“He abused you,” Charles says, very quiet, but deadly, an intentness in the blue that Erik’s astonished by: Charles feels protective towards _him?_ “You were desperate, and you were talented, and he took advantage of you.”  
  
“He—I wasn’t naïve. Don’t think that. I knew what I was doing. I just didn’t know what else to do.” He looks down. At the tea. “I do owe him. My mother died in comfort, without pain, because of him. I got my start as an artist because of him. It’s…complicated.”  
  
“I know,” Charles says, “about complicated,” and actually reaches over and puts his hand, the wounded one, atop Erik’s, over the heat of the mug. “Thank you. For telling me.”  
  
“You said…it wasn’t entirely true. What he told me. About you. I should’ve just asked you.” He wants to ask now. Doesn’t have the right. And Charles is continuing to hold his hand. He’s afraid to breathe.  
  
“I would have told you. I’d almost forgotten I hadn’t, honestly. I’ve told you everything else.” Charles glances down and back up, shrugs, smiles, though it’s bittersweet and not necessarily for Erik. “I have quite a lot of money, yes, but I don’t want it. I’m selling it off. The company. The property. I only ever planned to keep it for as long as it took to find them all. The children—they’re not children these days, we were all around the same ages, really. And then I’d take whatever profits were left from the sale and give it to them. One last apology.”  
  
“You were—what about you, though? Yourself?” He dares to turn his fingers, slightly. To fit them into those shorter broader freckled ones. “What were you planning to live on?”  
  
“Oh…” Charles laughs, though Erik’s not entirely sure why that’s amusing. “Well, I wasn’t going to be utterly altruistic, I suppose. I’d been planning to buy myself a penthouse somewhere with as small as share as possible for, er, a penthouse, because frankly I did want to keep my bed, and then I’d start letting Emma pay me for real. So…I suppose I only ever half lied to you.”  
  
“No,” Erik says, instantly, instinctively. “Charles, _no_. “  
  
A head-tilt; the gates’ve swung open far enough to reveal genuine astonishment, blue confusion. “Why do you care?”  
  
Might’ve been sarcastic, or snide, or a movement back toward hostility, a swing to reclaim the offensive. It’s not. It’s a real question.  
  
Erik, hearing the truthful curiosity like a spear through the chest, finds it difficult to breathe.  
  
Charles shrugs again, not waiting for an answer, not anticipating one. “So…is that it? All the cards on the table, to borrow a metaphor? Was that what you wanted to talk about?”  
  
“You said…” He’s trying to talk around the spear-point. It hurts. “Before…when I…before you shut the door, you said…that you…”  
  
“Oh, that.” That sentence, and the next, is a palpable retreat. “We can pretend I didn’t. Look, it’s not letting up out there; you can stay the night. I shouldn’t’ve thrown you out. I am sorry for that.”  
  
“Don’t,” Erik says, “don’t apologize, not to me,” and then, “I don’t want to pretend you didn’t,” and then, “I do care, what do you mean why, because I _do_ , because I woke up thinking that I would like to wake up with you every morning, Charles, I’m sorry I didn’t say so then, I’m saying it now.”  
  
“You—”  
  
“I know what you said. And what you meant. And I—I told you I’d do or say something to fuck this up, a long time ago—”  
  
“Two days ago?” But that’s not an angry edge. Closer to…teasing. Still wary, still exhausted, but maybe hopeful, too, peeking around the corners.   
  
Some of the spear-point sharpness eases, in his chest. Charles wants to, is attempting to, tease him.  
  
So he says, “Yes, all right, if you’re going to insist on precision, is _that_ why the vibrators’re sorted by length _and_ color,” and Charles is surprised enough to laugh out loud.  
  
“No, actually, that’s just to make picking the appropriate one simple…Erik?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Thank you. For…not leaving.”  
  
Erik wants to squeeze that hand, but it’s still bandaged, so settles for lightly placing his other one on top. And saying the words, out loud. For the world to hear. “I don’t want to leave.”  
  
“I don’t want you to. I was…” Charles stops. Bites his lip. “I don’t want to be alone. I might…” A pause, veering off; but the blue eyes dart down to that unsubtle bandage. Erik’s heart stutters. He knows it does; he can feel it.  
  
“You…that…oh, no. Charles, no. You didn’t…”  
  
“Not this,” Charles says, “this was honestly just the mug. When I was cleaning. But I…I thought. About what I might—about how I would. If I did. I don’t know.”  
  
“Don’t,” Erik says. “Please. That’s—just don’t.”  
  
“Just like that?”  
  
“I’m here. You’re here. You thanked me for…not leaving. You don’t get to leave either.” He looks at their joined hands, pointedly. Then back at those battle-scarred eyes. One more time: “Please.”  
  
And Charles takes a deep breath. Looks at their hands, as well. Then back up at Erik’s face, and nods. “With you here.”  
  
“Not going anywhere.” He tries for a smile. “I think we both know that’s true, by now?”  
  
And the answering expression unfurls, gradually, in those blue depths. “Yes.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“Good…what do you want to do, then?”  
  
“Tonight? I want to hold you. If you want that. In your bed.”  
  
“I want that. And after…”  
  
“Just tell me what you want. I’ll do it. Anything you want, Charles.” He takes a deep breath. Watches the eyes. “Anything you need.”  
  
Charles opens his mouth, stops with lips parted. Erik wants to kiss him; can’t, not yet. Maybe, he’s starting to have hope again, but not yet.  
  
“You…”  
  
“ _Anything_.” With emphasis. It’s true.  
  
“I’m not—”  
  
“Do you want me to tell you again that I’m sorry? I am. It was—that was the worst thing I could’ve said, wasn’t it? To you?”  
  
A glance away, down, back at their hands; but those fingers tighten around his. “Possibly…”  
  
“I’m sorry. I—will you let me try to prove it to you? Please?” Please.  
  
The thunder rattles the windows. They both jump; he keeps hold of Charles’s hands, careful of that bandage, and tries to ask again in the aftermath with his expression, with eyes, with those careful hands.  
  
Charles licks his lips. Thinking. Deciding.  
  
Erik wants to fall on his knees and beg for forgiveness. For a second chance. He’s aware that he doesn’t deserve one. That Charles might say no.  
  
“You bought bacon,” Charles says.  
  
“I…what?”  
  
“This morning. Yesterday morning, actually, I suppose. When you were out getting your things. And  shopping.”  
  
“I did…”  
  
“You remembered that I like bacon. And you told me that you would come back, and you did.” Charles tips his head to one side. Hair tumbles into his eyes. “You showed me your sketches. In bed.”  
  
“I don’t,” Erik admits, a bit unevenly because his voice is unreliable, “show anyone the sketches. The works in progress. I never—that was the first time. Since. With you.”  
  
“Works in progress.” Charles smiles, just a little. “I like that. And…thank you.”  
  
“I wanted to.” He’s continuing to be unsure where this is going. What Charles wants from him. If Charles wants him. “Is that…you do like that? You did…”  
  
“I do,” Charles says, and actually squeezes his hand, with surprising conviction. “I didn’t realize how…much that meant. For you to share that, with me. So, still thank you. For trusting me.”  
  
“And thank you. For…doing the same.” There’s real warmth in those blue eyes. That’s not his imagination. “Can I do anything for you now? For your hand, or—wait, shouldn’t you be sitting down, your ankle isn’t—what do you need? What can I do, for you?”  
  
“Other than simply being here, you mean…My ankle honestly is fine; we’re only standing here. Not going to run any marathons in the next few days, but I can manage being upright and holding your hand.”  
  
“I…like you holding my hand…can I at least get you a chair? If you want to stay in the kitchen and finish the tea?”  
  
“We can finish the tea in bed. You did say you wanted to hold me. And…possibly we can…try again? More slowly?” A small rueful grin, crooked and unguarded, and undeniably there. “This weekend has been rather intense…”  
  
“Intense is probably a good word.” Charles is still smiling, so he adds, “But not bad,” and spots the hint of a sparkle way back in the blue.  
  
“Not bad, no. In the end. So…”  
  
“I could…ask you out?”  
  
“On a…date?”  
  
“That’s the idea, yes. Would you say yes?”  
  
“…Erik?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Ah…” Charles is blushing. After everything, Charles is blushing, looking at him and turning delightfully pink, excited embarrassment coloring all that fair skin. “Yes, I’m saying yes, if you’re asking, but…I…may have never actually been on a date. What, ah…what would we do?”  
  
“You haven’t—” He stops. Considers his own memories. Excursions with Sebastian likely shouldn’t count. “So…neither have I. What would you like to do?”  
  
“Oh, god…” Charles starts laughing all at once, too much emotion overflowing into that voice. “We’re going to be terrible at this, aren’t we? I don’t know, what do normal people do? Dinner? A movie? What happens in the dreadful romantic comedies?”  
  
Because he can’t not offer, with Charles laughing, with the encouragement of the rain pattering away, merry and confident beyond the walls, he raises an eyebrow, attempts a gesture with one hand; Charles takes the first step across the space between them, but they both take the second, and they end up with his arms wrapped securely around that shorter sturdy frame.   
  
“I think we should make a rule,” he muses, into all the animated hair. He likes the way it sneaks into his mouth, when he talks. “No sex. At least not on the first date. Maybe not the first three.”  
  
“Oh…”  
  
“Not because I don’t want you. Exactly because I want you. Understand?”  
  
“I…think so. But…”  
  
“I’ll come up with something. Trust me.” He already has a few ideas. Charles likes chess. And science fiction. And strangely-flavored pizza.  
  
“I do,” Charles says, tipping that head back to look up at him, “trust you,” and Erik gets to kiss him at last, in the middle of the tea-scented kitchen, surrounded by drying water-puddles, to the accompaniment of the rain.


	10. Charles, On A First Date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they go on a date, and are happy. Also, cupcakes. And a few surprises, mostly of the good variety.

Charles gazes at himself in the mirror. Attempts, one final time, to make his determinedly vigorous hair settle down.   
  
The strands frolic up again. He has the impression that the mirror’s snickering at his attempts.  
  
“You could be more compassionate,” he grumbles at both it and the hair. “It’s a date. I’m going on a date. With Erik.” A loop of hair pops up at the back, companionably.  
  
A date. With Erik. His heart won’t settle down, either. It keeps thumping excitedly away inside his chest, fluttery anticipation and utter nervousness.   
  
He’s spending the day with Erik. The whole afternoon. What if they end up bored with each other? What if he talks too much or babbles about uninteresting subjects or says something utterly wrong? They’re not allowed to have sex, that’s a rule, he can’t distract Erik from his less than sterling qualities that way; what if this is a thoroughgoing disaster?  
  
Oh god it’s going to be a disaster. He should call Erik and cancel right now. Should pretend to’ve fallen ill, broken a leg, set the office on fire, something, anything—  
  
Erik would probably come over regardless, if he tried any of those. Would hover at his bedside and cook for him and rub his back, if he’s unwell. This is the man, after all, who sat outside in the rain for hours waiting to apologize whenever Charles finally opened the door.  
  
So there’s no getting out of it now.   
  
But he doesn’t _want_ to get out of it.   
  
He wants to go on a date, with Erik.  
  
On narratively perfect cue, a single glittering sunbeam shoots through the window and sparkles off his mirror.  
  
“All right,” Charles says to the world, and laughs, helpless not to, elated, thrilled and terrified to the core, “yes.”  
  
And he finds his best pair of jeans, the ones that fit like a second skin, and an assortment of shirts, which he flings back onto hangers one by one, finally settling on a blue knit sweater. Erik likes him in blue; he’s read that in those eyes. Erik hasn’t said what they’re doing; he can’t be too dressy or too casual, but this sweater’s hopefully somewhere in the middle. It’s encouragingly soft, at any rate.  
  
The hair is hopeless, but perhaps Erik won’t mind. Sex might be off the table—literally—for now, but there’s no prohibition about reminding the man of what he’s missing, after all.  
  
He considers his reflection. Grabs the black coat—the sun might be out, but it’s still a crisp East Coast water’s-edge day—and checks the combination, in the commiserative shiny surface. Not bad, despite the hair. The blue picks up his eyes. And this particular coat has a collar with just a bit of an edge; it might be his first actual honest date, but he’s not innocent, after all, and he suspects Erik rather enjoys that.  
  
He’s not fragile. He won’t break. He can match those lean muscles strength for strength.   
  
He catches himself grinning at the reflection. At the boy in the mirror who looks so astoundingly young and happy, dressed up for a date with the man he suspects he’s falling head over heels for, and excited about it.  
  
Erik’d spent the night, after all the confessions and revelations and turmoil, on that astounding and heartbreaking and painful and glorious day. Had held him close, the two of them lying heartbeat to heartbeat in the blankets and pillows of that bed, together against the world. Had kissed his temples softly when Charles had admitted to the lingering headache; had rubbed his back and found aspirin in the cupboard and brought him water in the pearl-grey light of pre-dawn.   
  
They’d agreed to wait a few days before the attempted date. Space. Breathing room. Time for Erik to work on his art, the commissions he’s been neglecting; time for Charles to light fires in that fireplace and call meetings with corporate executives and explain that yes, he’s serious, and no, he wants nothing to do with the family business, not now or ever, thank you.  
  
He’d been shaking inside the entire time—he was doing this, would be finished, would be free—but he’s also very good at role-playing, and he’d put on his best arrogant Xavier scion expression and claimed that he simply had no interest in the company, and they’d believed him. And why shouldn’t they; it’s true, more or less, in a way.  
  
He’s not signed all the documents yet. Most of them’re sitting on his desk, the last few being sent over by priority mail. He wants to read them thoroughly first. And he wants, for some odd symbolic reason, to have Erik there. To have Erik at his side, when he gives up any last bridge to that life.  
  
He thinks, he hopes, that maybe Erik will understand.  
  
He’s also incredibly easily aroused, at the moment, by the thought of Erik at all. It hadn’t been a specific order, not to relieve all that arousal in the shower or in bed or anywhere else, but Erik had smiled at him when leaving, kissing him hard and filthily; had murmured, when Charles’s hips pushed upwards of their own volition, “Three days, Charles, you can wait, be good,” and so he’s tried.  
  
It’s not been easy. Erik has no idea. Or perhaps does, hence the request.  
  
It’s confusing. Not the obedience itself, he can do that, but the _desire_ to obey. Not because Erik will punish him if he doesn’t—and in fact he doubts that Erik would, would only kiss him softly and tell him it’s all right—but because he wants to, because the thought of himself being good for Erik sends secret white-hot shivers along his spine, intimate and dark and delicious.  
  
He should probably get himself out of the bedroom. The smug wooden bedposts, full of memories, aren’t helping.  
  
He glances at the clock. Five to one; Erik’d said he’d be here at one, and Erik is the sort of person who likes to be precise, neither too early nor too late.  
  
Charles _likes_ knowing these little things about him. Likes knowing him. Getting to know him. Being with him. Being with him in bed—  
  
Oh, damn. Well, _that’s_ not helping the arousal go away.  
  
He takes a deep breath and think determinedly about ice cubes and cold lakes and his great-grandmother’s cats, and then runs downstairs and stops and stares at the door, and then makes himself go into the kitchen and putter around with the teakettle, because he’s still got four minutes to fill up somehow and he needs something to do with his hands.   
  
Something _else_ to do with his hands. Something distracting. In a different way.  
  
He throws a desperate glance around the kitchen. Spots his unwashed mug from last night’s tea in the sink, along with some forks that he’s not gotten around to cleaning.  
  
Dishes. In the sink. Oh god there’re dishes in the sink. Erik probably hates dishes, Erik’s probably perfectly tidy at home and inwardly cringes every time he walks into Charles’s bedroom—  
  
He lunges for the sink and throws everything haphazardly into the dishwasher and narrowly avoids impaling his hand on a fork when the knock at the door comes, one minute early.  
  
“Ow—damn—okay, then, you can just sit there and remain unclean—” He kicks the dishwasher shut and refuses to turn it on and sprints out of the kitchen and through the endless ghostly rooms to the front of the house. Skids to a halt on the polished floor, yanks open the door, and then their eyes meet and he just stands there breathless and panting and thinking, Erik.  
  
Leather jacket. Slim waist. Wrapped in jeans and pale halos of sunlight. Erik, at his door.  
  
Erik tilts an eyebrow at him. “Everything all right?”  
  
“I—yes—what? Why?”  
  
“You seem…distressed.”  
  
“I am not.”  
  
“Are you sure?”  
  
“I—” He stops. They’re already having an argument, of sorts, and Erik’s not even inside yet. “I ran,” he admits. Because it’s true. “When you knocked.”  
  
“You—” Erik blinks, then laughs, then a multitude of emotions appears to struggle for supremacy across his face. “I’m flattered, Charles, but—you didn’t have to, you shouldn’t—”  
  
“I did,” Charles informs him, and grins. “Where’re we going, on this date? Or—sorry, I should ask you to come in, offer you a drink, or—what did you bring? Is that food?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Kitchen, then?” He leads the way, and wonders what that means. Are they not going anywhere after all? Is this some sort of apology for that? Is Erik unwilling to be seen in public with him?  
  
No. He can’t think that way. He _won’t_. Erik’s here, and that means something, even if it’s not quite what he’s been picturing for their first…whatever this is.  
  
They wander over to the casualness of the bar-stools and counter-space, by unspoken mutual agreement. Charles belatedly recalls that suggestion of drinks, and hops off his perch and flings open the refrigerator, dramatically. “Drink? Beer? Wine? The unidentifiable green bottle I found in the back of the wine cellar? Anything?”  
  
“Non-alcoholic, Charles. I’m driving.”  
  
“Oh…oh, we’re still—oh, um, okay…” He excavates a can of ginger ale from the back. After a second’s internal debate, gets out the second and last one for himself. “Is this all right?”  
  
“Fine. We’re still what?” Erik pops his can open, then looks at Charles thoughtfully, and opens the other one too. “How’s your hand?”  
  
“Ah. Mostly healed. Not even wearing anything on it, anymore.” He wiggles the fingers at those skeptical eyes in demonstration, but stops short of pushing up his slightly-too-long sleeve to show the cut. Might not be exactly welcome.  
  
Erik grabs his arm and does it for him, but gently. “…you’re right. Mostly healed. You should still cover it when we go out. You never answered my question.”  
  
“I’ll answer yours if you answer mine.”  
  
“Fair enough. We’re still what?”  
  
“Ah…still…going out? Someplace? In—”  
  
Erik swears out loud, very quietly but with enough intensity to make the listening appliances blush. “You thought I wouldn’t keep a promise to you?”  
  
“No! No, I believe you, I only…I didn’t know what you had in mind, and if you want to stay here, that’s fine, we don’t need to go out, it’s probably not a good idea anyway—”  
  
“You think I’m ashamed of you? That I wouldn’t—Charles, the very first night we met I wanted to be seen in public with you. To walk around with you and see everyone else being jealous and knowing that you’d be coming home with _me_. Mine.”  
  
“…oh,” Charles manages, and hides his flush, burning mortification and sudden desire, behind a sip of ginger ale.   
  
“We are very definitely going out.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Your turn.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Weren’t you asking about the food? I brought you sandwiches.” Holding up the paper bag. “I thought…we could eat here? If you haven’t had lunch? They’re bacon, lettuce, and tomato. You said—we never got around to having the bacon.” There’s yet another unvoiced apology in those words.  
  
“I…approve of your sandwich choices.” He appropriates one for himself. Regains some equilibrium. This is _their_ date, after all. And Erik did like him on that aforementioned first night, being assertive. Flirtatious. Charming.  
  
He won’t do all of that, not the act, not now. But he’s not shy, either, never has been, except for when he’s asked to wear that as a persona. He _is_ curious, and he’s not afraid of challenges, and he likes Erik, too.   
  
So maybe there’s some sort of middle ground. Some space that’s…him, in between all the roles. Can’t hurt, at this point, to try.  
  
“In that case, if we’re going out, why’re we eating here? Other than the marvelous atmosphere.”  
  
Erik follows his gaze to the kitchen table. Blushes. Charles wants to kiss him, despite the presence of the sandwiches. “I…ah…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“You…your ankle…we could have started in the city, walking around, but I thought…”  
  
“Oh.” Truthfully, he’s not thought much about it for the last day or so. He lifts the foot. Wiggles it, tests it, flexes it. Erik opens his mouth, as if to protest; turns the words into, “Does that hurt?”  
  
“No.”   
  
“Are you—”  
  
“If you ask whether I’m sure, I shall throw this sandwich at you. Which would be a tragic waste of bacon and lettuce and extremely juicy tomatoes. So…after this, where’re we going?”  
  
“I have some ideas. Eat first.”  
  
“You’re not going to tell me? Is this normal first-date protocol?”  
  
“It’s what we’re doing. Finish the other half as well.”  
  
“I—yes, all right, stop looking at me like that. I do eat. And so should you. I’m not taking another bite until you do.”  
  
Erik’s grin is toothy and appreciative and a touch surprised. “You’re giving me orders, now?”  
  
Charles catches an escaping bit of bacon with his other hand, nibbles it off his fingertip. “Yes, I am, sir.”  
  
And Erik laughs, there in Charles’s kitchen with sunlight streaming through the windows and a sandwich in one hand.  
  
The day only gets better from there. Erik grabs his hand and tucks him into the car and drives them off to a place Charles in fact knows very well, which happens to be the largest used-and-rare bookshop in New York. Charles practically dives into the shelves; Erik trails behind him, smiling somewhat bemusedly, fond. “You did seem to like science-fiction…”  
  
“And fantasy. Oh—Ray Bradbury, and Tolkien, _The Children of_ _Húrin_ , you’d like this one—have you ever read any Tolkien? No? We’re finding you the Lord of the Rings saga then—oh, look, first-edition Tom Swift novels—!”  
  
After an blissful literary interlude, he stops to consider everything Erik’s carrying. Guiltily. “Er…I can narrow it down. Except we can’t put back the Tolkien; that’s for you. And I can take some of them. That must be heavy.”  
  
“No,” Erik says, “you’re not putting any of them back,” and takes them all up to the counter and arranges to have them shipped back to the house, and is in the midst of paying for it all when Charles realizes what he’s doing and plucks the top three paperbacks from the stack, just in time.  
  
“I’m buying these. For you.”  
  
“I brought you here. And…I asked you out. On the date. I should pay.”  
  
“You asked me out on _our_ date.” He doesn’t want to bring up the subject of money. He suspects he has more than Erik’s ever had, but that’s a tricky topic, just now. Besides, his argument’s still valid.  
  
“Charles…” Erik stops, shakes his head. But he’s smiling. “I get to buy you dinner, at least.”  
  
“Agreed,” Charles says, and takes his hand, right there in front of the bookshop owner, who doesn’t look scandalized at all, only beams at them delightedly.  
  
They wander over to Central Park. The sun pops out through the clouds again, and follows them around. It catches in Erik’s hair and eyelashes, when he tips his head, when he glances across the path as if confirming its safety for possibly-still-injured pedestrians. Charles means to roll his eyes at that one, but instead finds himself stopping between inhale and exhale to watch the tiny furrow between Erik’s brows, the satisfied smile when he finally turns back, under the clearing of the skies, drenched in afternoon gold.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
Charles shakes his head, because he’s not sure he has the words to explain, but steps closer to him and puts both arms around his neck and goes up on tiptoes and kisses him, quick and light but with conviction.  
  
When they part, Erik’s gazing at him with something like awe. “Charles…”  
  
“You said no sex. You didn’t say I couldn’t kiss you.”  
  
“No…I like you kissing me. You wanted to kiss me?”   
  
“It’s a good date,” Charles tells him, “so far,” and links their fingers again, while they meander down the path.  
  
They don’t visit the zoo; he lifts an eyebrow when they deliberately go the other way, inquiring, and Erik admits, not letting go of his hand, “I’m not overly fond of caged animals…” Charles nods. Concurs, “Neither am I,” and sees the lightening of the momentary bleakness behind pale eyes.  
  
Erik does have a destination in mind, which becomes evident after a while. He spots the tables from a distance, and grins. “Ah. Challenges. Loser buys dinner?”  
  
“No. You said I could buy you dinner. But…there could be more kissing…”  
  
“Not certain whether that’s incentive to win or lose,” Charles notes, and promptly claims white, at the chessboard.  
  
They attract an audience, about halfway through. Bodies begin drifting over, finishing their own games, commenting or kibitzing or studying in silence. He’s not surprised; he and Erik are both quite good, and they’re fairly evenly matched. Back when he’d been playing for Oxford and competing regularly, he’d’ve had a slight edge, he suspects; these days he’s neither as impulsive nor as ruthless as he once was. But Erik’s not used to playing in public, and, rather charmingly, blushes when he looks up and becomes aware of all the interested eyes.  
  
“Charles…”  
  
“Just ignore them. Or don’t, if you want to keep that bishop.”  
  
“What? Oh—no. Don’t tell me your moves. That’s not what I was asking.”  
  
“Sorry. There’s actually no way out of that one. What were you asking, then?”  
  
“I…” Erik gives up on saving the bishop and chooses to threaten Charles’s queen. “I wasn’t sure you’d say yes to this. The game.”  
  
“Why wouldn’t I?” He surveys the board. _That_ move would be a tactical retreat, and he’d rather not; but with Erik’s other bishop over _there_ … “I like playing against you. I’ve missed the challenge. Did I never tell you that? I should’ve, that first night.”  
  
“Thank you…for that night…and also for that knight….”  
  
“Oh, _damn_.”  
  
“Sorry. But…Frost said…one of the things she said…” Erik pauses, obviously trying to find words that can be said in front of the spectators. Several of those spectators’re busy placing bets. “She said you didn’t play. But I knew you did. So…”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, and fences Erik’s queen in with his own bishops and a pawn. He’d wanted to use the knight. “Yes.”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“Check.” He looks up to find those wintergreen eyes gazing worriedly into his. “I just told you, didn’t I? I like playing against you.”  
  
“Oh,” Erik breathes, very softly, and nearly forgets to move his king to the only possible escape route. More money changes hands, in the background.  
  
“Erik?”  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“…thank you.”  
  
“Oh,” Erik says again, and when he finally concedes that it’s checkmate—after a hard-fought final battle over three squares and the death of the pawn—he comes around to Charles’s side of the table and puts both hands on Charles’s face and leans down and kisses him, fiercely adoring, heedless of the cheers and wolf-whistles and bet-collecting from the gallery. Charles slides both hands up along Erik’s back and lets himself be pushed up against the table, stone edge hard against his spine, and has to remind himself that they’re in public and he probably ought not lift his legs and wrap them around that slim waist on the spot.  
  
Erik grins at him after, showing all those teeth. “It’s a very good first date.”  
  
“That’s your _first date?”_ says a woman from the audience. Her companion steps on her foot, and mutters, “Don’t interrupt them, maybe they’ll do it again…”   
  
One of the older men in the throng clears his throat, ventures up to Charles, holds out a card. “If you ever feel like an exhibition match, we’d be happy to see you. You and your, er, partner. I’d be honored to play against you myself; we can count that as your audition.”  
  
“Thank you,” Charles manages, a bit flummoxed; and then he reads the card. It’s got a name he recognizes on it. A very famous international name; two, in fact. The name of the current world champion, and his chess club. With an address, and a phone number.  
  
“I saw you play, once. University tournaments. I remember thinking I’d have to keep an eye out, in a few years.” The man beams at him. Charles is speechless.  
  
“I confess I wondered what happened to you. Pleased to see that you’re still around. And I mean it about stopping by. Or giving me a call.” And then he shakes Charles’s belatedly returned hand, and walks away.  
  
Charles sits down on the bench again, abruptly, and remains speechless.  
  
“Charles?” Erik sits down beside him. Touches his cheek with a careful hand. Apprehensive. “Is everything—”  
  
“I believe I’m being recruited…”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Here.” He hands over the card. Erik’s eyes get wider. “Charles, you know who—”  
  
“I know,” Charles says, and actually puts a hand over his mouth and laughs, in shock, astonished. “I know—”  
  
“You could end up playing internationally—or earning a title—or—”  
  
“Not only me, he said you’d be welcome—”  
  
“Yes, but he wanted to play against you.” Erik takes his hands, tugs him up off the bench so they’re standing pressed against each other, those long hands cradling his head, tangling in his hair, jubilant and supportive. “You’re amazing.”  
  
“You understand,” Charles says, muffled by the folds of Erik’s coat, the solid weight of Erik’s chest, the beat of Erik’s heart, where he’s currently being held and not opening his eyes for a while in case it all goes away, “even professional players barely make _any_ money, you have to be brilliant, you have to be the absolute best, and I’m out of practice, it’s been years, except for you, and—”  
  
“All right,” Erik says, and holds him, understanding. “All right. You don’t have to do anything about it now. Wait a week. Or two. I’m here. I’ll be here, whatever you decide to do. For now, just breathe—like that, good—and then I’m buying you dinner, if you’re hungry?”  
  
Charles nods, still shaking from the enormity of it all, and Erik kisses him gently on the forehead. “Better?”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“Erik…do you think we’ll ever have a normal sort of date?”  
  
“No,” Erik says, thoughtfully, starting to maneuver them away from the board and the pieces, through the rose and violet of sundown and green leaves at dusk, “and I wouldn’t want this, or you, any other way.”  
  
Erik buys him slices of pizza at a tiny historic place that’s old enough to’ve kept its red-brick oven, real floppy New York pizza with the cheese stretching over his fingers when he folds it in half and takes a bite, the taste of pineapple and ham and woodsmoke and tangy dough; he fumbles for napkins, after the first bite, flushing and feeling all of twelve years old, and then sees the way Erik’s looking at him.  
  
“I am not your pizza. Hardly edible.”  
  
“Oh, Charles, you have no idea.” Erik takes a bite of his own, follows it with a sip of beer. Charles watches the movement of his throat as he swallows, mesmerized.  “How’s the pineapple?”  
  
“Delicious. Are you certain you don’t want some?”  
  
“Fruit on pizza,” Erik sighs, but leans across the table to eat some when Charles summons bravery enough to hold out the slice and tentatively offer to share. “I suppose you’re worth it.”  
  
“Pleased to know that I’m worth a pineapple, then.” It’s half-joking. To hide the honest half, he appropriates a bite of Erik’s very traditional cheese-only slice. Erik is apparently a pizza purist.  
  
Erik regards this theft with dismay. “I’m not entirely certain that’s fair. You like mine more than I like yours. And…you’re worth many pineapples, Charles. In various forms. Didn’t you once say you had pineapple lube?”  
  
Charles nearly drops his pizza. Only his much-vaunted flexibility manages to save it. “You—you—you said we weren’t having sex! And yes!”  
  
“Oh, we’re not. I just wanted you to think about it.” Erik grins again. Takes another drink. Looks insufferably smug. Even stretches out a long leg and bumps Charles’s knee, sets a foot atop his, pinning him down with lazy command, under the table.  
  
Extremely unfair, Charles thinks, and takes a deep breath. All right. Challenges, again. Accepted.   
  
“That’s not,” he muses aloud, “a particularly kind way to tease your submissive, sir,” and then watches as Erik tries to inhale cheese and pizza-crust. Ah. Success.   
  
Just for good measure, he licks grease from his fingertips. Slowly.  
  
“You—” Erik seems to be having difficulty talking. “You just said—you _did_ just say—”  
  
“You heard me.” With some effort, he keeps a straight face. Takes a sip of his pint; runs his tongue over his lips, enjoying the taste, hops and foam and bitterness. Mint-leaf eyes, green and grey and entranced, track every motion. “I can repeat it, though. If you ask me to.”  
  
Erik appears to have lost the capacity for speech. Charles, all at once, finds himself wanting to laugh out loud: this is sheer fun, he can flirt with Erik and tease Erik and use all his associated talents to seduce Erik and it’s _perfect_ , wild giddy joy that goes dancing along all his veins and lights up the world.  
  
“Erik,” he says, across the cheese curiosity of the pizza, the polished wooden table, the glass twinkle of their pints.   
  
“…you. Me. Right. Yes?”  
  
“Definitely you and me, yes.” He holds out his other hand, the one that’s not been in use for food, palm up. Erik sets his own in it, not looking away; Charles squeezes. “I like going on dates with you.”  
  
“We should,” Erik says, squeezing back, “do this more often.” And nudges their feet together again beneath the table.  
  
He expects them to head for home after the pizza, but Erik doesn’t turn toward the car, instead leading him around the corner and down a few blocks. Charles, with shorter legs, scampers a bit to catch up at the light; Erik stops. “Are you all right? Your ankle—”  
  
“—is fine, thank you. You, on the other hand, have excessively long limbs. Where’re we going?”  
  
“Home, after this.” Continuing to worry, evidently. “But…I did have a surprise for you. Unless you don’t want to walk. We could—”  
  
“Stop that,” Charles says, and leans into him, arm around his waist, while the city lights come on and glimmer all around them. Like a fairy-tale, he decides.   
  
He’s not believed in happy endings for so many years. Never thought they’d exist, not for him. No fairy godmothers, no princes on white horses charging in, not even a feisty animal sidekick to make him laugh in dark moments and never lose hope.   
  
But suddenly that feels awfully lonely. And he wants, for the first time, to be able to believe in the ever after.  
  
He wonders how Erik might feel about being his prince. Shining armor, artistic sculptures, wonderfully kinky sex, chess matches every day, and kisses in the morning.  
  
“You’re smiling.”  
  
“Am I?” He matches their steps together. One, two. Even if he has to stretch. “I must be happy, then.”  
  
Erik stops walking. Turns to face him, right there on the crowded sidewalk. Uses one hand to tip Charles’s chin up. “Are you?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says. He is. It’s true. “Yes, I am.”  
  
“What you said…about being able to love someone…” Erik reaches over and brushes hair out of his eyes. The hair cheerfully falls forward again. “Me, too. That. You.”  
  
It’s not exactly an I-love-you; that’s all right. Neither of them is quite ready for that, he knows. Not yet. But it’s the next-door neighbor to a declaration. It’s more than he was expecting, now, ever, and it sends tingling blossoms of heat all the way through his body, beginning someplace in the vicinity of his heart.  
  
“I know,” he says, out loud.   
  
“You do?”  
  
“You weren’t exactly being subtle, sir.”  
  
“Cheeky,” Erik says, shaking his head, looking as if he wants to laugh. “I should probably spank you for that. Later.”  
  
“You were the one who said no sex on the first date. Three dates, you said.”  
  
“I did? You must’ve misheard. Only two.”  
  
“Ah. That’s acceptable, then. Though one would be better.”  
  
“Acceptable—” Erik does laugh this time. “Perhaps we should be doing this the other way around. You giving me the orders…”  
  
He can’t hide the look of dismay, even though he’s ninety percent certain Erik’s teasing. Erik grins. “Just making sure. I like you this way. _My_ cheeky submissive. We’re here.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“We’re here.” Erik waves at the bakery window. “Hang on a second.”  
  
“What? Why?”  
  
“Surprise. I said. Wait here.”  
  
He grumbles words under his breath about Erik and surprises, but waits, as commanded. Erik pops his head back out. “Sit down. There’re chairs.”  
  
“Not an invalid!”  
  
“Sit, Charles. They’re busy. It’ll be a minute.”  
  
He glares at the disappearing head. Sits. The lightweight outdoor chairs’re actually quite comfortable. And the stars have come out, competing with the city shine for brilliance; the night’s a nice one, not too warm or too cold, and the sweet hot scent of fresh baked goods drifts out from the door as it opens and closes.  
  
He thinks, again, about happy endings.  
  
And then a hand taps his shoulder.  
  
He jumps and spins around and nearly falls out of the comfortable chair. Clutches a spindly armrest for balance. Pushes himself to unsteady feet; catches his breath. The ankle twinges for the first significant time that day, meaningfully, like a double warning.  
  
“Ah…Charles?” The silver-haired man looks a bit uncertain, but determined. “I thought that was you. You…are you…waiting for someone?” _Any_ someone? inquires that tone.  
  
And it’s not merely any man. He knows this one. And the man knows him, just about as intimately as one can know another person, physically speaking at least. Has tied him down and caned him cruelly and fucked him over a bed while the deeper welts split open and bled.  
  
The truth is that this is one of the kinder men. Someone who’d been sorry, seeing the blood. Had offered to help massage soothing cream over red marks, had accepted Charles’s headshake without argument, and had tipped him generously, leaving.  
  
He can’t speak, as his worlds collide, what he’d tentatively hoped might be past and what he’d just been beginning to imagine for the future.  
  
“I didn’t think,” says the other man, “that you were…that you’d be…out here…did Emma Frost send you out on your own? Or do you not work for her, these days?” A pause, a lip-lick. “How…much would you want, for the evening, then?”  
  
Charles can only shake his head, searching for words. “I’m not—I can’t—” He stops. Takes a deep breath; stands up. Tries to make himself taller. It doesn’t work. “I’m sorry, but no. I’m—not available.”  
  
“I’ll pay you double—”  
  
“It’s not about money.” He can take care of himself, can fight back if necessary; Emma’d suggested that he go through basic self-defense training with the rest of her employees, and it’d been a good idea. But he doesn’t want to have to, not here on this starlit evening, not with Erik inside acquiring a surprise for him—  
  
“Please,” he says. “Just…I’m not available. I’m retiring. I’m—done. I’m sorry.”  
  
Fortunately, the man doesn’t push. Only regards him with some regret. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Very sure.”   
  
This gets a wistful but accepting nod. “I always thought you were too good to be true. To be doing all this. With people like me.” Charles blinks: really? But the man’s continuing. “Good luck, then. I’ll see you around, Charles.”  
  
“Thank you,” he says, and is a little surprised to find that he means it. “Same to you.”  
  
The silver hair vanishes, and almost in the same instant Erik’s hand lands on his elbow. “Charles?”  
  
“Erik—” He turns and trips over the chair, their feet tangling; Erik catches him, anxious and firm. “Charles—oh, no, you look—you’re so pale, sit down, please—did he hurt you, who was that, tell me—”  
  
“I’m all right.” He takes a steadying breath. Then another. “I’m only—rather off-balance. That—he didn’t hurt me, Erik, I’m fine.”  
  
“You don’t look fine.”  
  
“I am, though.” He rests a hand on Erik’s forearm. Feels the tension in those muscles. “He was—an old client. One of the better ones; not one of the—difficult ones, that I told you about…he wanted to know whether I was available. It was an honest mistake.”  
  
“You’re _not_ available.” Practically a growl.  
  
“No,” Charles says, placating the angry lion with another small arm-pat, with his own certainty, gaining strength by the second, with the warm solidity of Erik here, “no, I’m not. Not to anyone but you. I told him that. That I’d…retired.” He pauses to laugh, briefly, amazed. “Which I suppose is official now. I’m retired. I’m done.”  
  
“You…said that.”  
  
“I did. Out loud, even.”  
  
A hint of humor’s returning to those celadon-grey eyes, though there’s still a layer of ice when they glance down the street. The ice thaws, though, coming back to Charles. “I wish I’d been there.”  
  
“To hear me say it? I can say it again. Only yours, now.”  
  
“That, yes. But also…” Erik studies his eyes, kisses him, swift and sweet. “I want to be here. For you.”  
  
“You are.” He finds himself smiling again. “What did you buy?”  
  
“This place…the owners were friends of my mother’s.” Erik looks at the paper bag. “I thought…you enjoy tea. They make an Earl Grey cupcake. With lemon buttercream. I thought you might…like one.”  
  
“I would,” Charles says, still happy, and secure in that happiness, “like one. Very much. Thank you.”  
  
“Charles…” Recognizing the happiness as well. Playful. “Would you like one at home? In bed?”  
  
“Oh, really…”  
  
“Not for that! Not tonight. Possibly in the morning. I just…may I come home with you, and be here for you, and feed you a cupcake in bed? If you want that?”  
  
“I want all of that,” Charles says, “with you, sir,” and Erik’s  answering smile displays an improbable amount of teeth, and the streetlights twinkle back merrily as they half-walk, half-run to the car.  
  
Erik feeds him one delectable cupcake by hand, once they’re naked in the sheets, and then sneaks out the other one and starts giving him pieces of it too; Charles notices this disparity only belatedly and begins trying to feed Erik in return, an effort which results in lemon-flavored buttercream venturing into various interesting places, and then being licked off.   
  
Erik makes an on-the-spot executive decision that oral sex isn’t technically against the rules. Charles, as the beneficiary of this declaration, opts not to argue, especially when Erik’s mouth is so busily occupied pulling him into an orgasm that whites out his vision and sends fireworks up his spine. He gets revenge once he can think again, sliding down in the sheets before Erik thinks he should be able to move, and employing every last one of his considerable skills to attain what is, from the incredulously breathless reaction, some sort of speed record.  
  
“ _Charles_ —”  
  
“You were right,” Charles murmurs, licking assiduously, “I approve of the cupcakes,” and Erik’s just marginally awake enough to manage, “Do you want me to…” and Charles says, “Yes, please, stay the night,” and thinks please stay always, and Erik tugs him up into the circle of one arm and falls asleep with his face buried in Charles’s hair.


	11. Charles, Some Questions, And Some Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles gets to see Erik's studio, and asks a question, to which Erik says yes; Erik makes a suggestion, and Charles also says yes. Plus, porn.

They begin again, more slowly.   
  
It’s a certain specific definition of slowly: the kind that involves lazy mornings and Erik grumbling at Charles’s unused oven in German while attempting to cook dinner; the understanding that Erik doesn’t want to leave him alone for too long, not after some of those confessions, some of those bandages. The sort of careful commitment that leads to Charles getting a tour of Erik’s small studio, the space he’s currently renting, all steel and bronze and heat and rough casts, heaps of metal and unfinished plaster shapes hinting at raw beauty in the wide-windowed breezy space. Erik looks at him with slightly uncertain eyes; Charles smiles, and asks questions about the process, about the refinement and the cooling and the chemicals that produce _that_ particular patina, avoiding the personal temptations of the works-in-progress themselves.  
  
Erik smiles back, and relaxes, bit by bit, and shows him pieces in various stages of completion. A sculpture he’s making for the public library, with delicate book-pages so exquisitely reproduced that the text— _Alice In Wonderland_ —is readable in the light. A tiny sunflower with drifting edges that seem to reach for the light. A sharp bristly abstract shape that shouldn’t be serene, not with all those needlelike points, but somehow is.  
  
“It’s like dancing,” Charles says, to that one. Erik pauses. “What?”  
  
“With swords. Sword dances. It’s folklore. How have you not heard of—here.” Several mobile-phone internet videos later, he raises his eyebrows. “See? About passion. Knowing that you could slip, could fall, could be hurt…knowing you might be, but throwing yourself into it all regardless. Because the glory’s worth it. When everything comes together, and it’s right.”  
  
Erik’s staring at him. “Charles…”  
  
“Or something. I’m not an expert. But it made me think of that, anyway.” He shrugs. “Blame the Oxford education, and the insistence on cultural breadth courses?”  
  
“That one’s not finished.” Erik’s carried on staring at him. “I never…it never had a name. Not designed for a particular commission. Only for me. But you…”  
  
“Thank you for showing me?”  
  
Erik shakes his head and mutters something that sounds an awful lot like, “absolute _perfection_ ,” and when Charles opens his mouth to inquire, Erik swoops down and kisses him soundly, a headspinning crash of a kiss that ends with him pushed up against the wall and shamelessly begging for more, rocking his hips up against Erik’s thigh as it fits between his, the air shimmering with heat, plaster dust in his hair and down his back, and the tang of liquid metal around them, as he gasps and shivers and lets Erik take him apart and comes suddenly and unexpectedly in his jeans like a teenager, pinned firmly against lean muscle.  
  
His legs’re a little shaky, after. Erik holds him up, and whisks him back to a one-bedroom apartment with a spectacular city view, a block away. At first glance it’s rather spartan—its owner doesn’t collect things the way that most people do—but there’re stray loops of jewel-colored wire peeking out from odd corners like kittens at play, and painstakingly annotated cookbooks aligned on a shelf, and a single photograph, framed, on the wall.   
  
It’s young Erik—Charles recognizes that skeptical expression, wary of strangers, instantly—and both his parents. Laughing. Waving at the camera.   
  
“That was the year we came here.” Erik materializes at his side. “They loved the city. The noise of it, the life…I, ah. Don’t believe I have any clothing your size. I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what,” Charles says, and leans against him, comfortably, “getting me to have an absolutely marvelous orgasm in your studio? How are you ever going to get any work done there, now? They look happy.”  
  
“They were.” Erik kisses him, lightly. “I…forget that, sometimes. Thank you. Yoga pants? I’ll wash yours.”  
  
“You do yoga.”  
  
“There are still some things you don’t know about me, Charles. But…I did. For a while. I thought it might help with…some of the emotions, after.”  
  
“Did it?”  
  
“In a way.” Erik pauses, with a hand on the waist of his jeans. Charles lifts an eyebrow; lets himself be undressed. “I hated…hate…Sebastian Shaw. And I couldn’t…fully commit. To that kind of peace. But it was quiet. When I didn’t know much about quietness. And the shapes, the flexibility…I could use that as inspiration, at a time when I didn’t have a great deal of good inspiration. So, yes.”  
  
I think I love you, Charles very nearly says, standing there in the miniscule apartment, that long-fingered hand warm on his skin, their eyes catching. I think I’m in love with you, and I’ve never been in love with anyone before, and it feels like my heart wants to turn somersaults in my chest, and that’s kind of painful and also kind of perfect, and I want to be here for you the way you’ve been here for me, and I think it’s my turn to give you orgasms in semi-public places, and please kiss me again and never let me go…  
  
What if Erik isn’t in love with him? They’ve never said those words. And Erik only ever initially wanted the escort. Something—some _one_ temporary.  
  
Despite everything, those words, the ones Erik’d said aloud on that painful day, still burn: I’ve only known you a week, when did you think this was fair, I didn’t ask for this…  
  
Erik’s told him otherwise, since then. Has promised to be here. Has bought him books, for heaven’s sake. All the books. So very many books.  
  
But.  
  
But. Which one of those is more true, the words spilling out uncensored and passionate, or the measured-out concern in the aftermath, with the knowledge that there is a wrong thing to say? How can he ever know for sure?  
  
He wants to be sure. Wants to believe that this is more, what’s unfolding between them. But it’s so backwards, and so complicated, and so fast, and even if he’s pretty sure he’s in love, if this is what love feels like, there’s no way of knowing how Erik feels, in return.  
  
But he knows that he likes the way _he_ feels, when Erik smiles at him. That’s real.  
  
“Everything all right?” Erik runs a thumb under the denim, tracing freckles, not removing fabric. “You look very serious.”  
  
“Oh—no, I’m fine, I’m only thinking. Flexibility, you said?”  
  
“Are you attempting to get me to have sex with you? Because you were right about the workshop. I won’t be able to walk through that door without wanting you. You’re a terrible influence on me, Charles.”  
  
Charles smiles up at him, all purposeful mock innocence, and inquires, “Weren’t you the one taking off my pants, sir?” and Erik makes a helpless noise and all but rips the clothing from his body and proceeds to haul him off to the bed, since after all they need some way to pass the time while waiting for the laundry.  
  
Maybe it’s not the dictionary definition of _slowly_. But it works, for them.   
  
It does work. They work, somehow, impossibly, together.  
  
They see each other nearly every day, for the next week and a half. Erik stays over most nights, holding him against the dark, learning where the aspirin bottle lives in the bedside drawer for the headaches, surprising him with tea and scones in the morning. The scones’re a first attempt; Erik’s never made them before, and evidently Charles’s oven is not the friendliest after years of neglect. But they’re delicious, if slightly misshapen, and he eats three while lying naked in bed, and feels utterly decadent.  
  
“Perfect,” Erik says again, and smoothes hair out of his face. “Feel like getting up? Or you could stay here. Read one of your books. Let me sketch you.”  
  
“ _Me_ ,” Charles says, “why?” and then, more quietly, “Erik?”  
  
“Because you’re beautiful. Yes?”  
  
“Why…” They’ve not even had sex that morning. Only woken up tangled together, in the diamond-cool paleness of the day, and eaten scones.  
  
“Because,” Erik says, “you like scones,” as if it’s obvious. And perhaps it is.  
  
“Will you,” Charles says, after a moment, “play chess with me?”  
  
“You—”  
  
“I…need to practice.”  
  
“Yes,” Erik says. “Charles. Yes.” And they do.  
  
They don’t spend every moment together, of course. Erik needs time to create art; Charles needs time to figure out all sorts of looming questions, such as what he’s going to do with the company stock, what he’s going to tell Emma Frost, what he’s going to do with _himself_. But Erik calls him, the occasional nights they spend apart; they speak at least once every day.  
  
Erik calls him. Because Erik wants to talk to him.  
  
That’s terrifying, and beautiful. And it’s the best twelve days of Charles’s life.  
  
He calls Raven. She’d called back and left a message, which he’d not answered; she picks up this time, and he admits, over the phone, that he’s met someone, that it’s serious—he hopes it is—and that he’s quit working for Emma, and that he is, in fact, more or less all right.  
  
He has to hold the phone away from his ear for a while to avoid the shrieks, and then is forced to promise to send her a picture of Erik, and then finds himself unexpectedly near tears, when she offers to fly back to New York and give him a hug.   
  
He’d not realized, he understands, gazing at the phone in his hand, just how much she does worry about him. How much she does care.  
  
“I love you,” he says to her, not to her voicemail this time, and she sniffs very loudly and says, “I love you too, you idiot, you’re my big brother, now tell me more about your gorgeous artist, is he great with his hands, I bet he’s got excellent hands,” and Charles yelps _“Raven!”_ and then reconsiders this approach and tells her yes, and also that Erik’s equally great with his tongue, sometimes simultaneously, and Raven screeches words about oversharing and images and not wanting them, and all in all it’s the best conversation they’ve had for ages.  
  
He tells her he’s playing chess again, before they hang up. She’s quiet for a heartbeat or two, and then says, “I do want to come to New York.”  
  
“You—”  
  
“I’m about due for a vacation. And I’d like to meet this guy. And, Charles…”  
  
“I know,” he says, and sits on his bed smiling a little, feet scrunched beneath the covers against the light patter of the not-quite-rain.   
  
He kisses Erik very hard when those beautiful eyes arrive through the afternoon mist, carrying farmer’s-market produce and an overnight bag; Erik kisses him back, enthusiastically if somewhat surprisedly. “Impatient?”  
  
“Yes, but that was more of an apology in advance. My sister wants to meet you.”  
  
“I…see. Soon?”  
  
“Sometime,” Charles says, waving a hand, “she wasn’t precisely detailed. Is that…”  
  
“You might have to tell me what to talk about,” Erik admits, “I’ve never….met anyone’s family before. I’m not certain I’m good at first impressions.”  
  
“You’ve never dated anyone before. And I liked you. On first meeting.”  
  
“Neither have you. That was…different. You were—that was something else.”  
  
“Not that,” Charles offers, in one last reckless burst of honesty. “When you—the reason it was me. That night. I saw your picture.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“I told you that Emma…trusts me. To look over prospective clients, sometimes. I saw your file, and I thought…I don’t know, really. I asked her to let me have that one, instead of any of her regular staff. I wanted to meet you.”  
  
“You did?” Erik collects both his hands. Folds his own around them, keeping Charles’s fingers close. “That’s…slightly manipulative of you. But also flattering. I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, aren’t I, when you want something.”  
  
Charles looks at their hands. Together. Himself and Erik. “I don’t…tend to want very many things. I didn’t—I’m not used to wanting anyone, not like that. The way I wanted you.”  
  
“Really…” Erik’s also studying their hands. Shifts fingers; coils them loosely around Charles’s wrist, instead. “I hope I managed to be what you were wanting, then.”  
  
“You surprised me.” He catches his breath as those fingers tighten, teasing, tapping reminders over skin and bone. “Sir.”  
  
“I think that’s fair,” Erik says, “you surprised me, as well. But I’m not sorry. Charles?”  
  
“Yes?” He can feel his pulse beating, in his ears, in his wrist, under those seductive fingertips. The world feels distant, hazy, dreamlike. The scent of rain-fog and chilly weather invades his senses from the just-closed door, swirling around him; the contrast’s dizzying against the heat of those fingers, securing his arm. And Erik hasn’t even touched him anywhere else. “Please…”  
  
“Please what?”  
  
“Oh, god,” Charles says, “please fuck me, right now, sir.”  
  
And Erik laughs, and pushes him to his knees, right there in the entryway; wraps a hand into his hair and holds him in place and fucks his mouth, his throat, rough and messy and unrelenting, until he’s moaning and his thighs are shaking and the front of his pants is wet, soaked through and tented obscenely.  
  
Erik stops, pulls back, tugs on his hair. “Please,” Charles whispers again, voice ragged from the use, knowing exactly how he must look and not giving a damn because Erik’s there and Erik will take care of him, “please.”  
  
“I wanted to do this,” Erik tells him, “almost the second I saw you. I wanted you, on your knees, that mouth on my cock…”  
  
“Oh _god_ —” That’s cut off by said cock pushing past his lips again, at the back of his throat, one long plunge, and he gasps, chokes on the abruptness, catches a hip and keeps Erik in place at the first sign of any movement to back off and let up.  
  
“You like that? I thought you wanted me to fuck you, Charles. Or would you rather I come like this? Inside you, making you swallow it all…or on your face, covering you with me…”  
  
He moans, at that. Every inch of his body feels alight with need. Anything Erik wants to give him.  
  
“Can you come like this?” Erik does pull back, this time, allowing him to gulp air, though the tears, through the thick weight of that cock-head resting in his mouth. He licks it. Tastes how much Erik wants him.   
  
“Would you come, if I tell you to, on your knees, just from sucking my cock? How badly do you want this, Charles, that permission?”  
  
All he can manage, at this point, is a tiny whimper. Incoherent.   
  
“Charles.” One hand reaches down, finds his face, taps his cheek gently, assertive. “Still with me?”  
  
He nods, voiceless.   
  
“Still all right?”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“That’s not very convincing, Charles.”  
  
“Yes.” He’s shivering everywhere. “Yes. Please. Erik—I’ve never—I’ve _never_ felt—not ever, but you— _please_.”  
  
And the apprehension eases, at that. Replaced by fierce elated joy and want. “Not ever? So this is…new, for you. If I tell you to come for me, untouched, right here, at my feet…you’ve never done this with anyone. Like a virgin, Charles. And all _mine_.”  
  
“Oh please,” Charles says, a tiny desperate gasp. He can feel the first helpless tingle of it, coiling up in his groin, in the aching rigid weight between his legs, at the base of his spine; can feel his body thrumming with it. But he _can’t_ , not unless Erik permits it, and he’s Erik’s and he’s never been anyone else’s this way and it’s _right_ —  
  
“Shh,” Erik says, and strokes tears from his cheeks, the salt-water of exquisite denial. “Here.” That cock pushes inexorably into his throat again, filling him completely as he relaxes for it, no struggle at all, not here in the brilliant sea of euphoria and anguish and need, no doubts left, only blissful surrender.  
  
Erik shifts weight, moves a leg, presses it just _there_ , right where his own cock’s so swollen and leaking with need. The world goes white and sharp and blank with ecstasy; there’s a hand on his head and Erik’s voice saying, “Come,” and he does, collapsing into the brilliance, shaking with each wave, over and over, release that’s agonizing and glorious and unending.  
  
From very far off, he hears Erik gasp, some unheard sound that might be his name or some other word or no word at all, and the length in his throat swells and pulses and floods him with it, and he tries to swallow but he can’t get it all, and he can’t breathe too well, his entire body continuing to quake with the aftermath, and he coughs and struggles and Erik pulls back and wet heat spills over his mouth, his chin, his throat, covering him in Erik’s climax, while he shivers with the last implosions of his own.  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, panting, sounding a little panicked, “can you—can you breathe, are you—open your eyes, please—”  
  
I’m all right, he wants to say, but ends up unable to talk, attempting to swallow, coughing again, more of Erik’s release on his lips, his skin. He’s vaguely aware that he’s not lying on the floor, that strong arms have at some point caught him, and are holding him.  
  
“Oh, Charles,” Erik says, “oh, fuck—come on, look at me, are you—you’re all right, you are, I’m here—”  
  
He blinks. Regains focus. Erik’s holding him. Erik’s right there, millimeters away, holding him. Those mint-leaf eyes’re dark with desire, with worry, with all of the reactions.   
  
“Charles,” Erik tries again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t expect to—I just, it just sort of happened, I didn’t mean to, not then, not while you were—can you breathe? I am so sorry, Charles, this is me apologizing, please.”  
  
He swallows. Clears his throat. Licks his lips, tasting Erik there. “For…what, sir?”  
  
“Oh,” Erik says, “oh, thank you—” and then shuts his eyes, takes a deep and rather shaky breath, reopens them. “Are you—that—that was—”  
  
“I’m all right.” He pauses to consider. He feels…open and sensitive and kind of tremulous, everywhere, and his throat burns a bit and he’s exhausted and sticky, but he’s all right. More: he feels good. A little like he wants to cry, but good.   
  
“You…what you said…you called me a virgin.”  
  
“I was just talking…you seemed to like it…at the time…” Erik shakes him slightly. “Hey. Don’t go to sleep. You—we should make it upstairs, at least. Your bed, your shower…”  
  
“I’m not asleep. I’m…sparkly.”  
  
“Sparkly?”  
  
“You know. All over. I feel…” He waves a hand, indistinctly. Then loops it around Erik’s bicep, holding on. “Like supernovas. I think I enjoy letting you de-virginize me, sir.”  
  
“Oh, Charles,” Erik says again, but he’s shaking his head now, and starting to smile. “You—you _are_ incredible. Supernovas. All right, you’re all right, and you’re going to let me take you upstairs and clean you up and put you in bed. I’ll make dinner. Acceptable?”  
  
“Very,” Charles says, and curls weightlessly into offered arms, letting himself be cradled by all that devotion, believing in it with all his heart, “thank you, Erik.”  
  
Erik leaves in the morning, reluctantly. It’s reluctance on both their parts; Charles kisses him in bed, and on the stairs, and on the way out the door, and in front of the car, those hands sneaking into his hair and holding him in place, until Charles sighs and shivers and dissolves into the physical command, feeling it all the way to his bones, molten gold as the sunlight.  
  
Erik’s tongue explores his mouth, seeking out all the hidden spaces, assertive and possessive and kindly firm; Charles opens up for him, and loves the invasion, the certainty, the being claimed.   
  
Erik wants him. It’s intoxicating. Better than any drug, and just as sweetly languorous.  
  
Erik makes a tiny groan of frustration, and pulls away. Charles actually wobbles a bit on his feet, and grabs those lovely well-muscled shoulders for support.  
  
“Sorry.” Erik puts the arms back around him. “Better?”  
  
“Mmm. Yes. Will you be back tonight?”  
  
“Of course, if you want me. It might be late. I need to have drinks with someone. One of the owners of that new gallery, in fact…he was interested in my work…you could meet us.”   
  
“I could.” He considers this proposition, content and lazy, propped up in Erik’s arms in the morning sun. Overhead, clouds congregate and chatter and peek down avidly, then break up, racing off to meet up with others, beckoned by the wind. “Would you like me to?”  
  
Erik starts to answer, stops, frowns a little. “Look at me?”  
  
“I like looking at you. Why so serious, all of a sudden?”  
  
“I…” A brief pause, not a hesitation, Erik clearly working out words in his head before giving them voice. “Yes, I want you there. Because I like spending time with you, and because I would be proud to introduce you to anyone, Charles, as my…”’  
  
“Boyfriend?”  
  
“Partner? Significant other...all of those. You are significant, in any case. But. Don’t say yes because I want you there. Say yes because you want to be there. I’m not your client. You’re _not_ my escort. And everything we’re doing, if you’re my submissive, and you are, that’s only in the bedroom. Never say yes to anything—bedroom or otherwise—only in order to make me happy. Understand?”  
  
“Not only in the bedroom,” Charles observes, “in the kitchen, and the shower, and the entryway, and—yes, all right. Yes, I understand.”  
  
“Yes, you understand, or yes, you agree?”  
  
“Grammatical pedant.” He looks over Erik’s shoulder, for a minute, at the expansive and unkempt grass of the lawn. It’s very green, in the morning sun. Waving uneven blades cheerfully in the breeze.   
  
Then he meets those anxious eyes again.   
  
“I…agree. I think. It’s…you might have to tell me more than once. I didn’t even notice, that time. I’ll try. And I do want to, about tonight. Is that enough?”  
  
“For now, yes.” Erik kisses him again. The touch of those lips lingers, like the sweetness of the day, on his. “I’m not certain exactly what time. I’ll text you. And tell me if you change your mind. You can.”  
  
“I won’t.” He runs a tongue over his lips, tasting, finding support. “You…I did want to ask you a question. If that’s—”  
  
“That’s always fine. You should—just _know_ that one. Please.”  
  
“Then…you know you’re already keeping a toothbrush here…and those shirts…”  
  
“Was that too fast? You didn’t say anything, when I—is this about what we just said, because—”  
  
“No!” He grabs one tense hand, an apology. Holds on tightly. “No. The opposite. I was thinking…you rent that space. For your studio. And your apartment…”  
  
“…yes?”  
  
“If you would want…I have…rather a lot of space. Rooms that no one’s used in years. Or possibly ever. My mother’s old greenhouse. My father’s…laboratory workrooms. Those could all be used for something different. If you wanted.”  
  
“Charles…” Stunned. As if one of the playful sunbeams has just stopped playing and instead hit him over the head. “You…but that would mean…you want me to…and you want to…but this house, the memories, you were planning to…”  
  
“There are good memories,” Charles tells him, “also, now,” and Erik breathes again. “The…kitchen table. Your bed…”  
  
“I could stay here. With you.”  
  
“That’s…not moving slowly.” Erik puts both hands on his shoulders, looks into his eyes. “You’re asking me to move in with you. That is what you’re asking?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says. “Yes. I know—I mean, of course it’s too fast, and we’re doing this all wrong anyway, but I want you here, I feel—safer—with you here, and I don’t want you to leave, or at least I want you to come back to me, and I want to try to play chess for a living and kiss you in the mornings and I know it’s too soon, I’m sorry, just tell me it’s too much, tell me when I’m asking you for too much, I—”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, and sets a finger over his lips. “Stop. Breathe. Orders.”  
  
Oh. He can do that. Right.  
  
“Good.” Erik’s watching his eyes, intently. “I told you that I want to be here. That I want to be what you need. Anything you need. It won’t be too much. You remember me telling you that?”  
  
“…yes? Sir.”  
  
“Good, again. I also told you to give me a moment, if you ask for something big. Which this is. I—Charles, are you sure?”  
  
“Yes.” He is.  
  
“Then…” Erik starts to smile, gradually at first, then larger, excited, showing more teeth. “I won’t be able to move everything all at once. My rent is paid through the end of the month…and we’ll need to make space first, to see what would work best…if I bring pieces over a few at a time…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Then yes. Yes, I want to move in with you. Here.”  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes,” Erik says, laughing. “Yes. I do. If I’m allowed to replace your terrible oven.”  
  
“We can remodel the entire kitchen,” Charles offers, laughing also, dizzy with promises, with possibilities. “Pick out appliances. Together. We can—we can go appliance-shopping. Furniture. Bathroom towels…”  
  
“No monograms,” Erik announces, and Charles widens his eyes in fake distress. “And here I was hoping to get ‘property of Erik Lehnsherr’ embroidered on mine. Ah, well.”  
  
“Were you…” Erik’s eyes sparkle. It’s a good look, on him. Charles wants to see it more. All the time. “I’m certain we can come up with some alternatives. How do you feel about jewelry?”  
  
“What…like…cufflinks? Watches? In general not opposed? I’ve never really thought about it.”  
  
“I was thinking more…” Erik’s thumb traces his wrist. Over a pulse point.  “One arm. Something you could wear under a suit. Or…if we’re staying home, not going out…would you let me make you something else, as well?”  
  
“Like—”  
  
“You did say you’ve worn a collar. For someone else, once.” Erik lifts his wrist, kisses it, presses teeth lightly over the thin skin shielding the vein. “Would you wear one for me?”  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, wide-eyed, breathless, “you’re not allowed to leave yet.”  
  
“I’m not?”  
  
“No. You’re going to come back to our house with me and push me up against the first wall we come to and fuck me until I scream, because _this_ is your fault, sir, and you need to do something about it.”  
  
And Erik grins at him, and fits his hand around Charles’s very evident arousal, with Charles’s guiding hand still resting on his wrist, and strokes him through his jeans. Makes him whimper. “If you say so.”  
  
“Right now, please.”  
  
“In _our_ house,” Erik agrees, “right now,” and they barely make it through the front door, leaving bits of clothing scattered in the long-suffering grass along the way.


	12. Charles Meets Sebastian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles goes to see Emma and officially retires. And then comes home. And Sebastian's waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for the very end of this chapter, in which there is Shaw being creepy and then, er, abduction... Also, apologies for the cliffhanger. More soon. By which I mean Thursday.
> 
> I am horribly behind on answering comments--busy weekend--plus all the Comic-Con goodness--but shall endeavor to catch up! Love you!

Erik does leave, eventually, hair thoroughly mussed and a seemingly permanent happy smile in those eyes. Charles walks him to the car for the second time—quite aware that he’s walking a bit gingerly, but then that many sessions with that certain wonderfully blessed attribute inside him will do that, and Erik looks even more satisfied about this—and kisses him, and sends him off to get a bit of work done before that evening.   
  
He does swear out loud, mostly to himself, when he realizes that he’s been distracted enough, yet _again_ , to leave all that paperwork sitting on his desk, unsigned.   
  
He wants to finish it with Erik there; wants it to be a moment that’s about _them_ , himself turning over all his family’s company stock to various members of the board of directors, himself doing this with Erik’s hand at his shoulder, not exactly for support but in case he turns around and sets down the pen and doesn’t know how to inhale again.  
  
But it can wait. The papers aren’t going anywhere, and Erik’ll be back, and grumbling at his own forgetfulness only makes the grass and the sun and the breeze feel sorry for him. The little eddies pat him on the shoulder, sympathetically.  
  
“Fine,” he concedes, “tonight,” and dashes back to the house to grab his coat and his car keys, because he _does_ have something else that he needs to do, and it’s almost certainly better done without Erik, not because Erik won’t approve but because he suspects that Emma Frost won’t.  
  
He wants to do this in person. He owes her that.  
  
Emma’s petite dark-haired secretary doesn’t look startled to see him, because she’s perfected the art of unflappability, but she gives him a raised eyebrow and informs him that Emma’s on the phone. Charles nods, and settles into one of the lavish white leather chairs, and waits.  
  
It doesn’t take long.  
  
“Charles,” she announces, even as he walks through the door. “Strip.”  
  
“What—oh, for god’s sake, Emma. I’m fine.”  
  
“You,” she snaps, glaring at him from several inches of height advantage, “gave him your real address after one appointment, and you vanished for a week, and one of our other clients came in and told me that you had retired, and I know you, Charles, and _what the fuck did he do to you?”_  
  
That last he is Erik, of course. Charles sighs. “He didn’t—”  
  
“Strip, Charles. And if he’s hurt you, if I see one damned scar that wasn’t there before, I won’t bother with the police.”  
  
“Emma.” For a second, they simply look at each other, in the cool white office with the metal accents and thick carpet and closed doors. “I’m all right,” Charles tells her. “I can show you, if you want me to prove it, but I am.”  
  
“I do want you to prove it.” She sighs, too. “This isn’t like you, Charles. And you look…different.”  
  
“I feel different.” True. He doesn’t have any secrets from Emma, not physically at least, and she won’t back down; he unbuttons his shirt and lets it hang over his arms. Turns around. “See?”  
  
“Pants, as well.”  
  
“Honestly. Have I ever lied to you?” But he steps out of those, too. Looks at her evenly. “Also the last time you’re going to see me naked, by the way.”  
  
“Because you’re retiring. Yes.” She looks him over, up and down. He doesn’t blush; it’s professional. And he knows exactly what she’s seeing: bruises, yes, a few bite marks, the rough scrape of Erik’s beard-stubble over skin. Nothing worse.   
  
Erik had ended up spanking him once, two days ago, lovely follow-through on that promise from their first date; but those handprints’ve long faded, nothing to see there. He suspects that, while Erik’s happy to use toys if necessary, the intimacy of hands is preferred.  
  
He’s fine with that. More than. He likes Erik’s hands on his skin. Artist’s hands, he thinks again, and smiles.  
  
Emma touches his inner thigh. “All consensual? Even this one?”  
  
That’s the darkest of them, where the skin shows echoes of desire, deep and aching and sweet. He’d asked Erik to leave mementoes, to make him feel it, after. Reminders of them together. “Yes.”  
  
She looks at his eyes, not the marks. “You do look different. You seem…”  
  
“Happier?” He pulls clothing back on. Rebuttons the shirt. Then pauses, and smiles at her. A real smile, not the dazzling one he’d once used to bestow on clients who liked that look. “I am.”  
  
“Erik Lehnsherr,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m losing you to a bad-tempered artist with the charm of a great white shark. Of all people, Charles.” But she’s smiling back, as much as Emma ever smiles. “Drink, then? In celebration?”  
  
“In celebration,” he agrees. “But you’re not losing me. I mean. Not entirely.” When her eyebrows fly up, he hastily clarifies. “I’m not taking any clients. I’m Erik’s. Completely. But if you would…if you’d still like my opinion…on some of the prospectives…I’m not going to walk out on you. Not if we can avoid another Victor Creed encounter.”  
  
Emma hands him an expensive tumbler containing even more expensive brandy. Picks up her own. Smiles anew. “I do trust your instincts. And I trust you with my files. We could come to an arrangement, I believe.”  
  
“I’d like that.”  
  
“Then we’ll talk.” She clinks their glasses together. “Later. Now we can…be happy for you.”  
  
“Thank you?”  
  
“Charles…” When he tries to read her eyes, they’re honest. She means the words, at least when she says them. “I am happy for you. I want you to know that. I also want to never have to ask you to show me your bruises in this office again. So I need you to be sure. Do you trust him?”  
  
“With everything.”  
  
“Does he care about you?”  
  
“I think so,” Charles says, “Yes.”  
  
Emma raises her eyebrows.   
  
“He makes me want to smile,” Charles tells her, very softly, sincere. And she nods, and they drink to that, in silence, in her calm colorless office refuge.  
  
She does ask him to look at one or two prospective client applications before he goes. He suspects it’s some sort of test, as they all seem relatively harmless, judging from the photos and the phrasing of their requests. One has a mildly out-of-the-ordinary desire involving birthday-party paper hats; well, it’s not his place to judge, only to note that it’s innocuous, which he does. None of them look potentially cruel.   
  
Emma nods and accepts his judgment, and then shoos him away to be, in her words, “pathetically besotted” in someplace that isn’t her office. Fair enough, Charles decides, and leaves.   
  
It’s true. Inarguable. He is.  
  
On the drive home, he’s thinking about Erik. About the upcoming evening, and what he might wear, and the cheerful little tingle that scampers along his spine at the thought of being introduced to someone as Erik’s partner. The two of them being a couple. Meeting gallery owners and business associates together. Going out for drinks. Having a _life_.  
  
Plus, of course, all the glorious sex.   
  
Erik’s offered to make him a wrist cuff, a collar: tangible reminders, crafted with love. He’ll be honored by the gift, if Erik does; he breathes in, alone in the car, imagining the sensation. He’d never have to be alone, with Erik’s metal brushing a wrist under a shirt-sleeve in public, or looped delicately around his throat at home, as he kneels at Erik’s feet and looks up and their eyes meet.  
  
He catches himself humming along with the radio, absently echoing the tunes of oldies rock, The Beatles and Buddy Holly and The Zodiacs: _won’t you stay, just a little bit longer…if we have another dance, oh, just one more time…_  
  
He parks and hops out and nearly fumbles the keys and catches them, laughing at himself; turns and sees the man he’s never seen before on his front step, and stops.  
  
The man’s not very tall, and not precisely prepossessing, and dressed in a way that suggests he has no care for current fashion, but deliberately so: a statement, at odds with the world.  
  
And all of those alarm bells, the ones in his head that hadn’t gone off in Emma’s office, are clanging now.  
  
He walks up to the door, because he might as well, he’s obviously here. The man turns and smiles, and it’s not at all a pleasant smile.   
  
Mostly just to get the first word in, and letting all of his irritation show, he says,  “Can I help you?”  
  
“Oh,” says the man, glancing him up and down, while Charles’s skin shudders at the touch of that gaze, “I think you can. Charles Xavier, correct?”  
  
“Yes…do I know you?”  
  
“Sebastian Shaw.” A hand, offered. Charles takes it automatically. Even though his brain is shouting: no, you know this name, this bastard hurt Erik, run now, or kick him hard, even if Erik won’t thank you, hurt him back…  
  
“What do you want?” he asks instead. They’ll need to know. Him, and Erik. So that they can handle whatever this is—blackmail, threats, demands—together.  
  
“Perhaps we should talk.” Shaw inclines his head. It’s not a friendly gesture. Nothing about him, from his hair to his clothing to his cold reptile eyes, is. “Inside?”  
  
Charles raises an eyebrow. Summons all his family legacy, wealth’s disdain for those beneath contempt, into his voice. Every bit as arrogant as he’d once pretended to be. “Why should I invite you into my home?”  
  
“Erik’s told you a few things, hasn’t he.” Not a question. They size each other up for a moment. Opening salvos exchanged; no blood drawn yet, but weapons at hand. “Did he also tell you I paid for his mother’s hospital bills? For his first exhibition? Everything that gave him the life he has now. That’s mine.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles murmurs, “so generous of you, helping a fellow artist that way; what was the name of that piece you sold as yours again, that wasn’t? Or were there too many to count?”  
  
Shaw laughs, though it’s unamused. “He did tell you a few things. Surprising. Erik’s never been talkative in bed.”  
  
Charles lifts an eyebrow. Leans a shoulder negligently against the door. Making a point: he’s not going to open it. “If you’re trying to shock me, it won’t work. I know you abused him.”  
  
Those flat ophidian eyes narrow, reconsidering strategy. “No. Not much shocks you, does it, Charles Xavier? Emma Frost’s prize whore; is that what Erik likes about you? Having the best, so that he can flaunt it in my face?”  
  
“It’s not about you.” Inwardly, he’s furious—how dare Shaw talk about Erik that way, Erik who’s held him and bandaged him and kissed his temples when his head aches—but any reaction will mean giving ground, and he can’t afford that.   
  
“And you can’t astound me with your crudity, either. I know what I am. And Erik doesn’t care. So if you’re through attempting to insult me, you can get off my property before I phone the police.”  
  
“Do you actually believe he loves you? Don’t be stupid, Charles. He only ever wanted an escort. A one-night stand, regardless of how you’ve managed to convince him otherwise. He’ll wake up eventually. And he doesn’t like entanglements, my Erik. He won’t ever love you.”  
  
“Of course not.” That one hurts to say. Knives to the stomach, the chest, the throat, trying to stab the words before they can emerge. He and Erik never have said those words. Not those. He has no idea whether Erik ever thinks them, thinks about them, in the depths of night.  
  
“Do you believe you love him?” Shaw watches his expression; laughs again, avidly. “You do, don’t you? You, of all people…how can you be so naïve?”  
  
“I—” He stops.   
  
He does love Erik.   
  
It’s as simple as that. As clear as chess matches in the park, cupcakes in bed, warm arms in the night. Low-voiced purposeful commands and complete unshakeable security. Yes like the realignment of once-dislocated joints. Yes.  
  
He’s in love with Erik. He always will be.  
  
That moment’s one of unparalleled shining _happiness_.  
  
And then the comprehension: Sebastian Shaw knows it. Knows that he’s in love with Erik. He’s not been able to hide it, that understanding.  
  
No. Oh no, no, no.  
  
“I expected many things from you,” Shaw muses, glacial as the lowering black overhead, clouds choking out the sunset, “but not that. No matter, though; Erik doesn’t know. And wouldn’t believe you if you told him, frankly. So it’ll make this much sweeter.”  
  
“This what,” Charles snaps, abruptly fed up with all this, the stupid intrigue and the lack of a point and Shaw being here on his doorstep, and maybe that is arrogant after all, shades of his mother, but he wants this horrible person gone now, “did you have a reason for being here, sorry, I’m a bit busy,” and Shaw says, “yes, Charles, but you’ve not sold off everything yet, I know you’ve not signed your paperwork, I’ve been keeping an ear open,” and Charles says “what?” because when were they talking about the _company_ of all things, and Shaw steps closer, under the ominous slate-shade of the sky.  
  
“I want _everything_ you can give me,” Shaw says, and that body’s crowding his and Charles is already backed up against the door and he tries to kick out but then a hand out of nowhere lands over his mouth and nose, and there’s a cloth and a sickly sweet odor and he tries to fight back but only manages a single weak blow before the world goes swirling into darkness.


	13. Charles and Erik, In Pain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shaw does some horrible things, Charles tries to be strong, and Erik finds out what's happened. Check the Notes for warnings, please!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This and Monday's chapter are the two worst in terms of Bad Things happening to Charles. It'll get better as soon as Erik shows up to rescue him. (Though Charles plays a role in that rescue too.) For now, though:
> 
>  **Warnings:** the end of the Charles POV section, the first half, contains Shaw being gloating and awful and some, er, how does one describe...non-con that involves Shaw using toys (handcuffs, blindfolds, a dildo) on Charles, but not, ah, doing certain acts himself (yet). 
> 
> I have tried not to be too terribly explicit, in part because I don't think I could make myself write that and in part because, well, blindfolded and recovering from being drugged and all, Charles can't really see much...
> 
> If this is triggery, you may wish to skip down to the Erik POV section, in which Erik learns what's happened...

Charles awakens tied down. Blindfolded. Naked. Gagged.  
  
He’s woken up this way before, of course, and he knows the feeling of restraints, and he knows he’s not dead. These things ought to be reassuring, but instead he finds himself trying to scream through the rubber in his mouth.  
  
A ball gag. Oh god. That’s not merely an abduction; Shaw has toys. Plans.  
  
He tries to scream again. Nothing happens; no one comes.  
  
No one comes for him for a very long time, or what feels like a long time, and he attempts to not panic but eventually the panic stampedes in anyway, a tidal wave, a cataclysm, drowning everything, and he’s sobbing behind the blindfold, wrists jerking helplessly at the metal restraints, over and over, until it hurts, until he feels something wet slide down his wrist, and the thought that that’s his blood snaps him back to reality.  
  
Okay. So no one’s coming. That’s…better than the alternative, or one alternative, anyway.  
  
The mattress—it’s probably a mattress, it feels like one—is cold beneath his bare skin. The room, wherever he is, isn’t well heated.  
  
He tries to listen, since that’s about the only sense he’s got left. There’s no noise, either. His wrist throbs.  
  
Those are handcuffs, around his wrists. Around his ankles. He’s been out long enough for Shaw to strip him and cuff him and gag him and leave him…wherever this is…without him knowing.  
  
What _else_ has Shaw—no. No, he doesn’t feel any discomfort, not other than the annoyance of being cold and spread-eagled on a mattress for long enough to make his muscles protest. He’s also got a splitting headache, most of which he can likely blame on the drugs. But nothing else. Nothing worse.  
  
Not yet. Not _yet_.  
  
Shaw planned this. Had to’ve. Had come to his house prepared.  
  
Charles lies there and attempts to think, through the headache. Shaw doesn’t want him dead, that much is obvious. Had said, standing on that grey-hued front step, something…about the company…about the paperwork.  
  
Does he want the money? The influence? But why do all this, when there are easier ways to go about that, when Charles is divesting himself of it in any case? Not that he’d’ve sold anything to the man under any circumstances, but Shaw hadn’t even tried.  
  
But it’s not about that, not entirely. It’s about Erik.  
  
Mine, Shaw’d said. He won’t ever love you.  
  
The former isn’t true. Charles knows that the way he knows his own heartbeat, his own scars. He’s seen some of Erik’s less physical but equally deep wounds. So this is about Erik: about proving that there’s no one else for Erik but Shaw, even if that other person has to be taken care of in such a way that Erik won’t want him anymore. And, along the way, incidentally, the money.  
  
He wonders what Shaw has planned for him. How he’s going to be broken. He’ll have to be: he’s not signing any of those funds over without a fight. But, of course, that will simply accomplish the other aim.  
  
He’s not thinking, deliberately, about the second half of Shaw’s statement. Trying not to, at least. It’s hard, alone in the dark behind his blindfold. No one else here but the mattress and the headache and his thoughts.  
  
He knows Erik, or he’s been beginning to know Erik. Lopsided scone-efforts in the morning and worried eyes checking his very-healed ankle for any lingering weakness and art like the rediscovery of beauty in the rough metallic core of earth, the heart and soul and seams of the galaxy, ancient gold and iron and copper stories. He believes that Erik cares, or is starting to care, about him.  
  
But they’ve never said the word love. Not since the awful morning when Charles told him those words: if I ever believed I could’ve loved anyone, I was thinking it might’ve been you.  
  
Erik had said, in the book-cozy and tea-scented memory that’s their first date, other words: what you said, about loving someone…me, as well.  
  
He’d taken that as reassurance, at the time. As hope, sweet as sugar and lemon-cream frosting.  
  
But Sebastian Shaw knows Erik also. For longer than Charles has known him. Knows all of Erik’s pressure-points; knows the precise extent of that emotional damage, inflicted all those years ago.  
  
What if Erik meant those words differently: if I could love anyone, it would be you. Which is to say: I can’t. And I’m sorry.  
  
Horribly, he sees it all with utter clarity. And it’s sickening: he himself had said the words out of grief, in the midst of their argument; he’s been tentatively liking the thought, since then, that he might’ve been wrong.  
  
And Erik said them back unprompted, unprovoked. As if wanting to make sure that he understood the limits, the line they’ll never cross. Pity, in the end: I wish I could love you.  
  
He’s having a bit of a difficult time breathing, all at once. Not merely because of the rubber stretching his mouth.  
  
All right. All right, so he’s been stupid, and he’s been hopeful, and he’s been deluding himself. That’s nothing new, himself being wrong. Nothing new about not being wanted. He wishes it didn’t feel quite so much like a knife through the chest, but there’s not a whole lot to be done about that, other than silently bleeding out from the inside.  
  
He’s not very certain how one goes on living, with a knife in one’s chest. He can’t go back to Emma, to that life. Not without admitting how wrong he’s been. There’d likely be pity in her eyes, too.  
  
In at least one way, he’s still himself. He’s never wanted anyone’s pity.  
  
The whole future question’s fairly academic at present in any case. Handcuffed to a bed and all. He can’t reach whatever he’s cuffed to, even when he stretches exploratory fingers and toes.  
  
But he’s good at surviving, historically speaking, and Shaw hasn’t killed him yet. And he knows from experience that he can handle rather a lot of pain.  
  
Which is of course precisely when he hears a door open. Footsteps come in.  
  
“So. How long’ve you been awake?” Shaw. Of course. His skin crawls.  
  
A hand touches his wrist, lightly, interested. “Long enough to do some damage to yourself. Stupid, Charles. You’re mine now. And nothing that’s mine gets broken until I want it to be.”  
  
Fuck off, Charles tries to say, shivering, behind the gag.  
  
“What was that? Oh, right. You can’t talk. Is that how you captured my poor Erik, by the way? Your voice? Your mouth? Using that mouth on him?” The hand closes around his injured wrist. Squeezes. He can’t hold back the wince; doesn’t try. _Those_ sorts of clients tend to enjoy the results of their labors.  
  
“I know all about you, Charles. Such experience, for someone so young. You do like it rough. Kinky. Filthy. Dirty, Charles. You’re a whore. Oh, I know you’re not really—or not yet—but you did want to pretend.”  
  
The hand leaves his wrist. Slaps him, hard, across the face. “Erik left me. For a whore.”  
  
Erik left you because you’re a sadist, Charles wants to say. Because you’re sick, and evil, and he’s not, he’s a good person, and I hope you burn in hell, you bastard.  
  
With some effort, he makes a very impolite two-fingered gesture, with his good hand. Should get his point across.  
  
Shaw actually sounds surprised, when he laughs. “Such fighting spirit. I am impressed; I know how much you like to submit. But evidently not to me.”  
  
Charles rolls his eyes, even though no one can see.  
  
“I think I’ll fuck you later.” As casually as if he’s selecting produce at the supermarket. “But for now, only this. A before picture, if you like. I’ll send this one to Erik first.”  
  
Oh god. Oh god, no, that’s going to tear Erik’s heart out of his chest and rip it in two; not because he loves Charles, Charles isn’t stupid enough to think that any longer, but because he’s heard the catch in Erik’s voice when Erik talks about losing his parents, people for whom he cares, and Erik will believe that this is his fault, and Charles can’t let him be hurt that way again.  
  
He shakes his head violently, because that’s all he can do to protest, but it’s better than not trying.  
  
Shaw sighs. “At the moment you’re still an intriguing challenge. And I’m impressed that you can find ways to argue with me, even, well, given our respective positions. But this is going to get old very, very quickly. Understand?”  
  
He decides not to answer, this time. There’s no answer he can make that this man might accept.  
  
“Ah, you see, I did ask you a question. Perhaps you need…encouragement.”  
  
What?  
  
He attempts to peek around the corners of the blindfold. It’s a bit looser than it should be, properly speaking; he can see a tiny crack of light, sneaking in. Some absurdist part of his brain wants to criticize the technique. He’s been blindfolded and restrained before, by experts. This is far from that.  
  
“Don’t move,” Shaw advises, “or this will be much more painful,” and out of nowhere there’s something hard and thick and cold and quite likely metal between his legs, pushing against that opening, where there’s no lube or slickness or anything to ease the way—  
  
He screams around the gag when Shaw plunges whatever it is into him. He can’t not scream. He can’t even think.  
  
“Better,” Shaw says, and simply leaves it there, buried inside him, huge foreign weight splitting him in two, and his face is wet with tears, and he lies there lost in the impact, muscles clenching vainly around the invasion, trying to expel it but unable to, whatever Shaw did isn’t going anywhere, and every motion explodes a whole new world of pain inside him.  
  
There’s the subtle click of a camera shutter. Taking pictures.  
  
“Wait here,” that voice says, “and be good while I send these to him,” and then walks away.  
  
Eventually, the pain takes over the universe, and Charles wanders off into velvety forgiving dark.  
  
  
  
  
Erik’s having a good day. A very good day, in fact.  
  
He’s moving in with Charles. He’s going to live with Charles. More: Charles was the one who asked. And who’d been sure, saying that yes, this is what he wants. Erik’s what he wants.  
  
Charles wants a life, wants to build a life, with him.  
  
He pauses to grin at that library sculpture, just because. Finished, it gleams metallically back at him, excited.  
  
Of course it’s excited. Charles likes art. Therefore all the art likes Charles.  
  
He should be more hesitant about this change, more resistant. Should want his independence, his own space. After Sebastian, that’d been all he’d wanted. No invitations for anyone to get close.  
  
Charles has gotten close, has slid his way past all of Erik’s defenses and been perfect in every freckled and flawed and complicated way, without waiting for an invitation.  
  
He stands there dripping with sweat from the concentration and the heat, grabs his towel, swipes it over his head. Thinks, Charles. Ends up grinning again. Toothily.  
  
The sculpture doesn’t mind. And Charles likes his teeth. Likes to feel them, on delicious spiced-cream skin.  
  
He really ought to shower. And change. And look presentable, mostly for the gallery owner who might want to show his work, and a little bit for those summer-ocean eyes, because they’ll glow with appreciation at Erik in a tie. He enjoys that look.  
  
Charles said yes to coming with him. To being with him. To being a them.  
  
To wearing a wrist cuff, or a collar, if Erik made one for him.  
  
He thinks he will. He’s been imagining that all day, in the back of his mind: nothing large or heavy, nothing in fact that Charles couldn’t remove himself, if desired. Only at home, and not even all the time; he won’t ask for that, and wouldn’t necessarily want it. But Charles occasionally needs—and more, enjoys—the reminders, he knows. Erik wants him, wants all of him, and the blue eyes light up with that knowledge too, each time it’s reinforced.  
  
A symbol, then. For them to share.  
  
The gallery owner’s gotten back to him about the time and place for drinks, a relatively innocuous bar frequented by aging businesspeople who like to pretend to be cool and hip and with it; he texts the details to Charles, along with an offer to pick him up early for dinner first. No immediate response; well, perhaps Charles is busy. Perhaps one of those meetings, some of that paperwork, isn’t going smoothly.  
  
He wants to be there, if that’s the case. He knows how painfully liberating it can be, to walk away from one’s past.  
  
Irresolute, he pauses, phone in hand; then catches a glimpse of himself in a picture-frame reflection. All sweat and metal-dust. Ragged tank-top. Hair everywhere. Unshaven.  
  
Shower first. Then, if Charles hasn’t called or texted back, he’ll try calling.  
  
In the shower, he can’t help picturing those eyes and that fair skin and indulging in one or two of his favorite memories, with the added detail of copper and white-gold adornments around those wrists and that elegant throat, and he ends up jerking off under the spray, gasping as the orgasm hits, abrupt and satisfying.  
  
Maybe he’ll tell Charles about doing so. Charles, who’s no doubt been trying very earnestly to obey that not-exactly-an-order about denial and waiting for Erik’s command. They might have to go find a convenient men’s room after a drink or two, and he can put his tie to an even better use.  
  
Charles likes it when he’s inventive. Likes it when he’s possessive. Likes all the pieces of him, the cracks and the anger and the need to not let go when he’s found something to hold on to.  
  
He wants to be there for those extraordinary eyes, not because they need the support, but because he _wants_ to be there. Charles is the strongest person he knows, endless fascinating maze-paths and brilliant corners and secret passageways and crooked stairs, and he also knows he’s going to spend the rest of his life being fascinated.  
  
And, admittedly, also incredibly turned on, by the sparkle in bright eyes, the line of those shoulders, the curve of that perfect backside.  
  
Standing in the shower, legs wobbly with the aftermath of orgasm, out of nowhere, he thinks: I am absolutely in love with Charles Xavier.  
  
Of course he is. Not even a surprise. He’s known it for some time, deep down: the words arrive like a truth he’s understood without being able to articulate, simply present in his heart, in his bones, in the beat of his blood beneath his skin. And he’s not scared, because it’s all a part of him.  
  
He should probably tell Charles this fact.  
  
He’d said something close, on their first date. He’d not been sure, then, whether he could be in love; not that he doesn’t believe love exists, he knows it does, he’d seen his parents. But this, with Charles, has been so fast. And it’s not as if he’s got any basis for comparison.  
  
But if he’s anything, he’s sure of his own decisions, once he’s made them. And he _knows_ that he’s in love with Charles.  
  
Maybe Charles thinks that love isn’t possible; almost certainly, he suspects, Charles doesn’t believe that anyone’s going to say those words to him, and mean it. Charles is the one of them who said it the first time: _if_ I could believe in love.  
  
Well. He’s just going to have to change that. He’s not quite sure how, yet, but he’s determined. And they’ve come so far already. If Charles is willing to trust him just a little more, willing to at least try to listen, then he’ll say the words and not ask for them in return. Not until those blue eyes are ready.  
  
He’ll say them for as long as it takes. Over cupcakes, or a chessboard, or a cup of tea; in bed, or in the bedroom, at least, when he can say them with a hand on that head, fingers curling into all that hair as Charles kneels, weight underscoring the declaration.  
  
He will still have to say them for the first time, and it’ll have to be tonight, because he’s not certain he can wait.  
  
He scrubs shampoo-foam through his hair, making it stick up in spikes, and thinks about when, and where, and how he might make it perfect; whether he should just turn up at Charles’s door to collect him and, when that door opens, kiss him breathless and then say the words; whether he should wait until after drinks, so as not to derail the evening plans, and then take Charles back to the park or a bookstore, maybe, yes, a bookstore, and he can find poetry or something else romantic, he can be romantic, surely he can…  
  
The shampoo slides down the side of his face, decidedly unseductive, and makes him splutter and get back to the task at hand.  
  
Maybe he’ll just take Charles home after the night’s outing and make tea, being domestic because Charles likes the way Erik appropriates his underappreciated kitchen, and bring a mug over in a soft curl of steam and take a freckled hand in his and say, thank you for coming out with me, Charles, for letting me come home with you afterwards, I want to come home with you always, I want you, I love you.  
  
He kind of likes that one.  
  
Once he’s clean and clean-shaven, though still shirtless because he can’t fight off the desire to hear that eloquent voice for another second, he checks the phone.  
  
Nothing. That’s…not right.  
  
Frowning, he hits the speed-dial.  
  
Only rings. And voicemail, medieval-spires accent tinny with electronic distance.  
  
Charles might not’ve answered the first text if busy, but wouldn’t ignore a phone call. Not when they’d been making plans. Not when they’d parted smiling, the taste of just-kissed lips lingering on his in the sun.  
  
It’s not sunny now. Clouds’ve come in, without him noticing. A bruise-colored evening.  
  
He tries calling again.  
  
Charles wouldn’t not answer him. They’d been happy. He’d thought they’d been happy.  
  
What if something’s wrong? What if it’s physical, one of those headaches, the ones that Erik hates because he feels so helpless to battle them away, exploding into a migraine, or worse? What if something else’s happened, without him there, some old family memory or voice out of the past, shaking all those newly-reconstructed foundations?  
  
He’d hidden Charles’s father’s pistols in the attic after hearing that story, after understanding what it was that Charles might’ve done, that day. Charles’d smiled at him, when he’d come back down dust-covered and satisfied that they’d not be findable by anyone except himself, whenever the antiques were bundled up for sale.  
  
But they _might_ be findable, if Charles is determined enough. And Erik knows, and it chills him to the core, that this is a possibility, that it’s one Charles has contemplated before, though not recently. Not, he’s hoped, since they’ve begun to be honest with each other.  
  
He hits redial, and swears that if Charles doesn’t pick up this time he’s going over there, never mind that it’s two hours early, that he might be overreacting, that he’s half-dressed and panicking and feeling like his heart’s about to burst out of his chest because it’s beating so loudly.  
  
No response.  
  
He grabs the nearest shirt he can find and bolts for the door, tripping as he fails to put on his shoes and run at the same time, and then his phone yowls at him, and he actually does fall over, one shoe in hand, and sits down on the floor painfully hard.  
  
Charles, Charles, please—  
  
Sebastian. Of all people. Now.  
  
He lifts a finger, angry and afraid, to delete the message, and then stops. _Check your email_ , it says. Which might just be another one of Sebastian’s numerous ways of fucking with him, but there’s something odd about the simplicity of it, no pet names or angry flirtation.  
  
He deletes the message anyway, but then slowly gets back to his feet, and slowly walks over to his laptop, and slowly opens his email.  
  
The first message has a subject line that says _I’ve taken care of him for you_. There’s no text in the body. But there are pictures attached.  
  
He clicks one, hand moving as if on its own, dragged by a sense of forbidding dread.  
  
He doesn’t process, for a moment. Sebastian sent him…porn? No, not porn; the dark-haired young man blindfolded and tied down and gagged and being penetrated by a metal dildo looks…broken, and wounded, and there’s blood between his thighs and on one wrist, over pale skin and freckles and…  
  
…freckles.  
  
Hair like expensive brandy and skin like cinnamon-cream and golden freckles and an old scar decorating one visible elbow like a souvenir of survival.  
  
He sits at his computer, unmoving, while inside he’s stumbling to his knees, gasping, vomiting into the wastepaper basket.  
  
Charles. Sebastian has Charles. And has—has—  
  
He can’t even think the words. No. No, no, this can’t be real, Sebastian’s a possessive manipulative ruthless bastard but he would never—  
  
For you, that subject line winks back at him. Sebastian _would_.  
  
“You bastard,” he whispers, and it’s Sebastian, and it’s himself, because he knew, he knew how fucked-up Sebastian was, and he could’ve warned Charles, should have, but he’d never explained properly, obviously not, not well enough; and he wasn’t _there_ , he left Charles alone and now Charles is—  
  
Charles was alive when the pictures were taken. Likely still is; Sebastian won’t waste this opportunity so quickly.  
  
He takes a single breath, feeling the air filling his lungs, letting it out. Then another one.  
  
He types, with fingers that don’t feel like his, _What do you want me to do about it?,_ and hits send.  
  
The reply comes back almost immediately. _Whatever you want, darling boy. We can enjoy him together—he does look quite delectable—or I can make use of him for you, or you can do it yourself. Come over and we can talk._  
  
He almost doesn’t open the other photos—he can’t, can’t look at Charles this way, violated and tortured—but he steels himself, because he needs to know. How bad it is. What’s been done, and not yet done, to him.  
  
In the second to last shot, Charles is making a defiantly rude gesture at the camera with one hand. It’s almost out of sight; Sebastian plainly hasn’t noticed.  
  
Erik puts both hands over his face and breathes, holding in tears, and relief, and rage, and hope, and despair.  
  
Charles is still in there. Somewhere. His Charles, the boy who’d challenged him with martinis and beaten him solidly across a chessboard and argued with him passionately about his art, all on the very first night they’d met.  
  
Charles _had_ been there. Then. Might not be, by the time Erik is able to reach him.  
  
There are new bruises on that delicate skin in the last picture, blossoming blasphemously over ribs, thighs, low on his stomach, and dark enough, in that vulnerable place, to conceivably mean internal injuries. Sebastian must’ve looked at the previous snapshot. Charles might or might not be conscious; Erik can’t tell.  
  
He can’t lose Charles. He can’t. Not now.  
  
“I love you,” he says, to the pictures. “I was going to tell you. I was—I’m still going to tell you. I’m going to find you, and tell you I love you.” It’s a promise. Unconditional.  
  
 _Give me an hour_ , he sends back to Sebastian. _Need to take care of a few things._  
  
 _Don’t be late._  
  
He won’t be.  
  
He looks at that previous photo again. Charles is stronger than anyone knows. Stronger than Sebastian; stronger than Erik himself, to be able to send that message.  
  
One hour. And Charles will be safe, and Erik can hold him, and he’ll be all right, he will be, he’ll have to be. Bruised and injured, but surely not irreparably shattered.  
  
Surely not. Not in an hour. It’s Charles; not in a lifetime. Erik tells himself that, and stands up. He’s wearing his nice pants, the ones he’d picked out for tonight, for seeing Charles; his dress shirt’s lying abandoned across the bed.  
  
He’s still going to see Charles. That’s a promise, too.  
  
Nothing else matters, not now.  
  
He looks at his phone again. One hour. Time to plan.


	14. Charles and Erik, Determined

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Shaw is a sick and horrible individual, Charles is hurt and scared and determined, Erik is VERY angry, and Emma Frost provides some assistance. Check Notes for warnings--this is the other chapter that contains Bad Things happening to Charles!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings:** the Charles POV section, after some introspection, once Shaw turns up, contains non-con and aftermath, though not terribly explicitly described (although it's still pretty obvious what's happening, it's not like moment-by-moment detail). 
> 
> If this is triggery, you may wish to stop when Shaw arrives and starts talking, and skip down to the Erik POV section, in which Erik is very angry and has plans. This section contains one of my personal favorite moments, the one that kind of makes me want to cheer.

Charles has been drowsing, half-awake, trying vaguely to estimate the passage of time. He’s thirsty, though not hungry, not yet, though that might only be the result of the fists that’ve been applied to his stomach. He wonders how bad it is; he can’t tell, but the results feel quite thorough.  
  
The rest of the pain, lower down, has faded to a kind of dull throb. It helps that he can’t move; he suspects that any motion will jar all the torn places into bleeding anew.  
  
He _is_ thirsty. This might become a problem, if Shaw’s planning to keep him long. He’s fairly certain the plan isn’t to kill him, but that might happen regardless; not as if he’s in the hands of the most conscientious of kidnappers.  
  
The dreadful oldies music pops into his head again, in a misguided attempt to keep him company: _won’t you place your sweet lips to mine; won’t you say you love me, all of the time…?_  
  
Well, he thinks, I would. If I could get out of here.  
  
He’d like the chance to tell Erik those words. I love you. Even if Erik doesn’t say them back, Erik’s the one who’s taught him what they mean. He wants to say thank you for that.  
  
He’s even colder, now, and there’s a stabbing sort of sharpness when he tries to breathe deeply. Ribs cracked, if not broken.  
  
He catches himself humming along with the ridiculous song in his head. For the first time, he knows that he’s afraid: not the initial frantic response, but the insidious slithering comprehension that he might be very badly hurt, might be left here all night through Shaw’s negligence, might not ever see Erik again to say those words.  
  
At least the music’s there for company. And the mattress, underneath him; he’s pretty sure he’s got blood on it, and he would apologize, but his lips’re parched, stretched around the gag.  
  
But. He’s not dead yet, and he can still think, more or less, and Shaw doesn’t _want_ him dead, which means…well, it means he’s alive. He can work with that.  
  
He also would rather like to use a restroom. Bloody Emma and her bloody celebratory drinks. Alcohol’s a diuretic; that’s just unfair.  
  
No one ever tells you about this part of being abducted, he thinks, and tugs experimentally at a handcuff. The metal clanks.  
  
That’s…an odd clank. One he recognizes. Of course Shaw’s bought cheap handcuffs. The kind that Charles would never purchase for himself in a million years, because they’re flimsy, because they’re unreliable.  
  
Because they’re easily opened. He’s done it himself, way back when he’d been new to bondage, when a client hadn’t released him upon completion of the assignation, when he’d had to learn. With a paper-clip.  
  
Okay, he thinks again, I could very much use a paper-clip. And less blood on my right hand. And, while we’re wishing, some water and also a magic rocket-ship to get me home.  
  
Still, he knows a fact that he didn’t know before. He turns his head enough to rest one sore cheek against the cool mattress; lets it try to comfort him, and wonders how he can use that, drifting in and out of sleep.  
  
He’s snapped back to wakefulness by new sensation. At first he can’t quite localize it; and then it focuses, abrupt and brutal.  
  
A hand on his naked cock. Squeezing. He tries to curl inward, instinctively; then there’s more pain, and he remembers.  
  
“Good morning.” Shaw’s hand unfastens the blindfold; Charles gasps, shuts his eyes against the invasion of light, opens them more slowly. Hates himself a little for how grateful he is to see a face, any face.  
  
It’s a bedroom that he’s in. A very empty one. Aging white walls, no decorations, the bare mattress on the old-fashioned four-poster bed. How thoughtful, to get a bed with posts to cuff him to.  
  
The wood gazes at him apologetically. It’s all right, he promises the knots and swirls. Not your fault.  
  
“It’s not really morning, of course. It’s only been half an hour or so. I’m expecting Erik very shortly. There are a few things we need to get done, before then.”  
  
Charles settles for his best glare, since he can’t reply. His head throbs; it’s worse than before, and he suspects he’s dehydrated, possibly seriously.  
  
“You,” Shaw informs him comfortably, “are going to be quite useful. Erik left me, all those years ago, because he didn’t believe I could deliver what I’d promised. Because he didn’t think we could truly change the world. And I admit I’ve not had the best of luck since then. Financial troubles…a lack of patrons with any taste, in the art scene…but that doesn’t matter. Because you, Charles, have money. And a company with government research contracts. We can create all sorts of interesting…art. Real social change. Bloody and screaming. Won’t that be lovely?”  
  
He rolls his eyes. Pointedly. It’s a bad supervillain monologue. And he can’t even put his hands over his ears.  
  
“Yes, well, you’ll see it soon enough. Perhaps I’ll let Erik convince you. You do love him, after all. Pity he won’t feel the same. Since he’s coming back to me.”  
  
No. Whatever Erik’s planning, it won’t be that. He won’t believe that. Not his Erik.  
  
Not _his_ Erik. No right to use that pronoun. The Erik he’s known.  
  
“First, though…” Shaw runs a hand over his chest, consideringly. “I think it’s my turn, for you. Erik’s had you; half of New York’s had you, from what I hear. I can’t imagine you’ll mind.”  
  
That takes a second to sink in; and then he shuts his eyes while it does.  
  
“What, no enthusiasm? Tsk. I’ve heard such promising things.” Shaw slips a hand between his legs. Finds the metal plug. Charles understands what’s coming the second before it happens. Not enough time to prepare. Not enough time to do anything but get lost in the red-black dizziness, as the length jerks free.  
  
“Hmm,” Shaw says, and walks away, and comes back, and actually dabs some sort of cloth between his legs, as if concerned about the blood. It’s a ghastly funhouse mirror of Erik’s aftercare.  
  
He keeps his eyes shut, through the rustle of clothing being lost, through the weight atop him, the slickness—oh, Shaw’s chosen to use some sort of lubrication on his own cock after all, how kind—and pictures Erik, behind his eyes, in the dark with him. Beside him.  
  
The first wave of violation, of agonizing stretch and tear, is the worst. After that, it all more or less blurs together. Indistinguishable.  
  
He’s been fucked hard before, and carelessly. With toys, with blunt objects, some of them covered in wicked little nubs and protrusions that’ve left him sore for weeks.  
  
This is worse. He’d always had the knowledge, those earlier times, that it was his choice: that even if something went wrong, he’d put himself in that position. He’d let himself be pushed; had asked for it. Had wanted the pain.  
  
With Erik it’d all been different. Hadn’t been only—or even mostly—about the pain. Had been…good.  
  
This isn’t good. This isn’t even the kind of torturous release he’d once thought he needed.  
  
This _is_ worse.  
  
Shaw grunts and pushes viciously inside him. In the dark, dream-Erik holds out a hand. Invites him to take it.  
  
He looks at the peaceful undemanding nothingness, and whispers, Erik, I’m sorry, and honestly doesn’t know what he’s going to do, when he lifts his own intangible hand to respond.  
  
Shaw sets heavy fingers on his throat, and Charles remembers Erik’s hands there, in another lifetime, real and caring and solid, there because Charles asked him to, there because Erik wanted to be, and he thinks back to the dark, no, fuck this, I’m going to _live_.  
  
He opens his eyes.  
  
“Ah,” Shaw pants, “you are with me, how nice, I was hoping for some reaction,” and removes the hand. “Now—show me that you’re worth whatever Erik paid—for you—”and fucks him harder.  
  
Fortunately, any sort of real response is effectively prevented by all the restraints. He settles for not resisting; seems to be enough. This is—not fine, not even familiar, not like this; but it’s a certain mindset. Endurance. He can.  
  
Shaw runs a hand over his unresponsive cock. Scowls with displeasure. “Not what I’ve heard about you, Charles—I want you to come for me, I want you to know that I’ve made you come, that you’ve given me everything—”  
  
The hand strokes his shaft, horrific gentleness at odds with everything else. Teases his slit, coaxes a tiny frisson of awareness through the agony.  
  
“You know,” that voice tells him, kindly, “that you deserve this. That this is how you get off, humiliated, tied up, being used. That’s what you need, Charles. I know. I know everything you’ve done.”  
  
And there’s a shift in angle, inside him; there’s so much pain that it’s turned into a kind of remote concept, unreal, and so when Shaw strokes his cock again it’s almost a relief.  
  
“You got off once by licking Emma Frost’s boots, didn’t you? On the floor, Charles. Depraved. Disgusting. But you like that; you know that’s all you deserve, a boy like you. Everyone wants to fuck you, the boy who’ll do anything. No one loves you. But they love you for a minute, don’t they? When you’re good. In bed.”  
  
He’s not sobbing because he can’t. No moisture left for tears. But that hand is relentless and so’re the words and the memories and the searing leather reality of all those scenes, all those desires, those climaxes, pulled out of him by whips and canes and boots and hands, and the shame of it’s even worse, because Shaw’s not wrong about him and what he needs—  
  
“Ah,” Shaw says, and laughs. “There you are. Is it the humiliation, then? Or the pain?”  
  
Fingernails bite into sensitive flesh. Charles gasps, through the gag.  
  
A client. Think of him as another client, one who won’t be satisfied with anything less than complete and total surrender, and he can do this, he’s done it before—  
  
Shaw plays with him and teases him, cock still buried in his ass, and he feels himself respond, and he loathes his body and himself, but the degradation’s right, whispers that sly secret voice in his head, it _is_ what he needs. Of course this is him.  
  
That hand caresses him and that cock splits him open and then the other hand settles on the gag and pushes it deeper into his mouth, covering his nose as an afterthought, and he can’t breathe and he’s Shaw’s and he’s helpless and he’s being fucked and he lets go.  
  
And comes from it, abruptly, spilling into that hand, across the bruises on his own skin, and then the world, overcome and drowning too, turns grey, losing consciousness.  
  
Shaw slams into him a few more times, goes tense, shudders; there might be extra wetness, more heat, but he can’t tell, at this point. It all hurts. Distantly.  
  
Shaw rolls away. Done with him. Wanders off someplace without a word.  
  
Charles wants to vomit; can’t, being tied down and gagged and hurting now so badly everywhere that he wonders whether he’s going to die after all, which would be cruelly ironic considering that he’s just decided to live.  
  
But Shaw comes back, clothed and clean, and studies him for a minute. Then snaps the gag out of his mouth. “Better?”  
  
His jaw aches. He can’t talk; but he nods.  
  
“Here. Have a reward.” Water. And a straw. It’s absolute heaven. The best combination of atoms in the universe.  
  
He almost finishes it all, and then recalls that he did need to find a restroom, and runs through several of Erik’s best profanities in his head, and stops.  
  
Shaw looks from him to the water, and then laughs, guessing very accurately. “Really? Now?”  
  
“What,” Charles manages, weakly, “am I not being a cooperative victim,” and gets a scowl. “I should leave you here, for that. Make you piss yourself. But…we don’t have time. Up, then.”  
  
“And by up…you mean…while I’m cuffed to your bed?”  
  
This earns another slap to the face. “Does Erik enjoy your mouth, Charles? We’ll have to work on that.”  
  
No answer, but none’s required, this time. “Well. He is coming to see you. You can’t be too badly used, so we’ll have to clean you up. Wouldn’t want him upset with me before we even begin.”  
  
“Yes, because cleaning up the evidence will make it all better. Has anyone ever told you you’re a terrible strategist—” That one’s cut off by the sudden appearance of a gun, all sleek deadly metal, and all of it shoved hard against his forehead.  
  
“If I didn’t need you,” Shaw snarls, and Charles can’t actually think of anything to say, nothing clever or witty, no defensive sarcasm, because that’s a gun in his face and he’s never felt that before, not even from the most sadistic clients, and it’s cold and unkind and very very real.  
  
That horribly self-aware part of his brain chirps: now you know what it feels like, aren’t you glad you never tried, yourself? He wants to shout something back at it about wanting to fucking live, but all he can focus on is _gun_.  
  
“I don’t like guns,” Shaw notes. “Too slow. Individual. Messy. I always preferred explosives. Better ratio of impact to expenditure. However, I do find that a handgun can be excellent persuasion. Now, don’t move a fucking muscle, and especially do not talk. You can nod. Understand?”  
  
Yes. He understands that Sebastian Shaw, in addition to being a sadist and a rapist, is a fucking psychopath; and he finds himself even more in awe of Erik, having the strength to grow up with this man and then to walk away.  
  
He nods.  
  
Shaw nods back, sharp and curt. Then opens the handcuffs, and the ankle cuffs, keeping the gun trained on him. Says, “Walk,” and so they do.  
  
When they reach the tiny dilapidated bathroom, lights flickering windily overhead, Shaw shoves him in first, then leans against the door, gun casually out, plainly not going anywhere.  
  
Charles mentally sighs. Tells himself again, you’ve done worse, and you’ve survived; you can do this. And uses the tiny toilet in the corner, wincing and trying not to notice the evidence as his kidneys protest; steps into the box-shaped shower with its lack of concealing curtain, and shuts his eyes and lets the water stream over his head, all without looking at or acknowledging his observer.  
  
The rush of the drops, the drumming comfort of the heat, drown out the outside world, just for a while. A few heartbeats, himself and the water, almost like safety, as it tries to hold him close. There’s pain, as the heat scalds raw places, but it’s a better kind of pain. Annealing.  
  
Shaw clears his throat, in the background. Time. It’s important. Erik will be arriving.  
  
He sets that idea aside, after one heart-piercingly brilliant second. He’s not certain whether the brilliance is hope, or despair. Either way, he can’t let himself feel it, or he’ll crumble into pieces.  
  
So he doesn’t. He used to be good at that, before Erik. To survive this, he’ll need to be good at it again. To survive this, and whatever happens after, when Erik looks at him with disgust or, worse, that world-ending sense of pity.  
  
There’s a crack running through a central tile on the far wall. He focuses on that, so he has no room left for other speculations. For iced-river eyes, cracking and thawing and spilling over their banks with concern. That’s a memory. That’s all it’ll be.  
  
The crack peeks back up at him, compassionate and crooked. He looks away. Gets on with the shower, as ordered.  
  
There’s soap, blessed soap, though no shampoo; it doesn’t make a difference, though, and he luxuriates in the feeling. Removing all the detritus of Shaw from his skin; not as deeply as he would like, he’ll never lose those memories, but at least he can be clean.  
  
He can scrub lather and hot water over his body, and he can hold on to the hope that this won’t last much longer, and that’s something. Two things, even.  
  
The soap stings, against abraded skin. On his wrist. Other places.  
  
But it’s a healing kind of sting, and it’s all right. He’ll be all right.  
  
He tells himself that, soundlessly. Watches the water wash pinkness, redness, away from his thighs, down the drain.  
  
There’s no mirror, so he can’t see the full extent of the marks. Might be a good thing; he’s not sure he wants to know. Shaw, on the other hand, is no longer visible, strangely enough, though he won’t’ve gone far. No point in trying to run.  
  
There is a pile of clothing, when he gets out. Jeans. A white t-shirt that isn’t his. No shoes or socks; obvious, when he thinks about it, but unnecessary. Where does Shaw think he might try to go? He doesn’t know where he is.  
  
No underwear. He stops, jeans in hand. Takes a deep breath. Then another. Then shouts, “Shaw!”  
  
The ophidian eyes turn up and lounge in the doorway, entertained but icy under that. “You’re summoning me, are you? Perhaps you’ve forgotten how this works.”  
  
“Oh, fuck off. You can’t actually expect me to wear these. Not without something else.”  
  
“You get to wear what I give you, Charles—”  
  
“Yes, of course. But I’m bleeding, you idiot. I’m assuming you’re planning to show me off, since you’ve given me clothes, and I can’t imagine you want bloodstains on your bedding or your carpet or wherever the hell you’re going to put me, so at least get me a towel or tissues or something, honestly, if you’re going to rape someone be prepared for the aftermath,” and Shaw looks momentarily off-balance, at that.  
  
He takes some comfort in that result. Small victories.  
  
It doesn’t last, of course. Shaw vanishes around the corner, comes back, throws a hand towel at him. “Will this do?”  
  
“Fine.” It’s too bulky really—he’s not bleeding _that_ badly, though it does hurt—but it’s better than nothing.  
  
Shaw studies him while he shrugs into jeans and shirt and runs hands through his hair. The scrutiny’s unwelcome and it makes his skin skittish, but it’s not as if he’s not been looked at before. And he’s showered and he’s got some sort of temporary triumph, so on the whole he’s coping fairly well, he decides. It’s the false calm of fatalistic bravado, of course, but he can work with that.  
  
“What now? You take me out and parade me around? More photographs? I should warn you, I charge extra for that.”  
  
The backhand splits his lip open, and the pain’s sharp and immediate, but it’s worth it.  
  
“I should fuck you again,” Shaw hisses. “I should get random people on the street to come in and fuck you. Whatever they want to do to you, Charles. But you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Whore.”  
  
“I told you. Your vocabulary doesn’t impress me. Buy me a drink first, at least.”  
  
Shaw shakes his head. There’s blood from that split lip on his hand. Charles resolutely does not think about the _other_ blood, in now-covered places. “Knees.”  
  
“Proper positions? How very cultured of you. Surprise.” He does kneel, though. No point in being hit again, and Shaw’s losing patience. The overhead lights gleam down, all blank chrome and uncaring florescence.  
  
Shaw studies him again, and then steps closer, making ostentatiously certain that the gun’s visible. Charles wants to roll his eyes. Does the man honestly think he’s going to try anything? Now, on the aged tile of the bathroom floor, bleeding and bruised and likely torn open somewhere inside?  
  
One hand holds up an object. Leather and metal. With— “A _dog_ collar? Seriously? Could this abduction be more cliché?”  
  
“Charles,” Shaw says politely, “shut up, or I will gag you again,” and fits the collar on him.  
  
Charles wants to scream.  
  
Even his skin flinches and pulls back at the sensation: no, no, _no_ , god, he’s not Shaw’s, he doesn’t belong to this man. He’s worn a collar before, yes, but he was done, he was done with all that, he’d been thinking he might do it for only one other person in his life, if Erik asked, only for Erik…  
  
This is wrong. It’s a perversion.  
  
It’s not merely a collar. It tightens, when Shaw yanks on it. Designed for that purpose.  
  
He coughs. Tries to breathe. Puts a hand up and fights, half because he knows those vicious eyes want to see the reaction and half because it’s instinct, needing air.  
  
Shaw doesn’t let him breathe. Not until he loses balance, head swimming, and collapses to the floor, pulse screaming in his ears, world blurring, no longer able to stay upright even on his knees.  
  
Shaw won’t kill him, he’s fairly sure of that, but at the moment it’s rather hard to remember that fact, as the world fades to murky silhouettes, water splashed over wet paint…  
  
The tightness loosens. He gulps in air. Gradually, becomes aware that he’s lying on the bathroom floor, cheek pressed into cold damp tile.  
  
“Oh, Charles,” Shaw sighs. “So now you know which one of us is in charge. Get up.”  
  
He does.  
  
Shaw takes him back to the room and cuffs him again, though thankfully upright and minus the gag. Hands behind his back. One ankle, tethering him to the bed; Charles lets out a huff of irritated breath. “You’re giving me options? So considerate of you.”  
  
“Despite what you think,” Shaw says mildly, “I’m hardly a terrible person,” and Charles nearly laughs aloud, but the amusement dies unvoiced: this man believes, he understands, that that’s true.  
  
Shaw leaves him collared and tells him it won’t be long, Erik’s on the way, and Charles stretches out on his side on the stained mattress, trying to find the least painful compromise between all the bruises and the rest of the injuries, and shuts his eyes.  
  
Erik. Erik, coming here.  
  
He doesn’t believe for an instant that Erik wants him like this—not on any level of that statement. At the deepest level, he _knows_ Erik wouldn’t force an unwilling partner. The first night they’d met had been proof of that, and all the nights since, if he’s needed more. Erik cares about his comfort, about his pleasure, about his consent. He knows that with unshakeable conviction. And Erik is a better person than Shaw ever could imagine.  
  
He’s also not naïve enough, despite Shaw’s mockery, to think that Erik will still want him.  
  
Erik might come for him, yes. Erik will come for him, because Erik _is_ a good person, but this is too much. No one, especially not a man who’d only ever desired an escort and a night of fun, should have to stand by him after this. He’s hurt and he’s scared even if he’s doing a damned good job not showing it and he’s not going to be able to have sex with anyone for quite a long while even if he wants to, and he’s not sure he’s ever going to want to, he can’t picture it, the thought makes him flinch away.  
  
Even Erik. Even Erik, because it’ll hurt, he knows it will, and he can’t, he just can’t, and if he can’t even give Erik that…  
  
Alone in the shadowy room with the big bare mattress and the peeling walls, it’s that comprehension, at last, that makes him give in to the need to cry.  
  
Through the tears, not in defiance of them but only a single bit of flotsam in the wreck, there’s one more thought. The words he wanted to say. The words he needs to say to Erik. No matter what Erik says or doesn’t say or won’t ever say back, no matter what happens after that, no matter how badly that newly split lip hurts when he speaks.  
  
The sobs are noiseless, when they streak fire across the bruises on his face. Too deep for sound. Pulled up from the roots of his heart. He can’t, won’t, let himself imagine Erik’s reaction. If he doesn’t, he can pretend he doesn’t know.  
  
He can’t pretend well enough to convince himself that Erik’ll say the words back. But he _can_ determinedly not picture the moment after he speaks. So he stops the imagining there, at the precise point when he’s done what he’s set out to do, said true words, succeeded in that at least. That he can do. And he will.  
  
He’s going to see Erik, and he’s going to say those words. I love you.  
  
With his hands cuffed behind him, he can’t scrub away the tears. But the mattress is present and anxious to help, so he turns his face into it, and tries to breathe shallowly because anything else hurts too much, and repeats that vow to himself, behind closed eyes.  
  
  
  
  
Erik knows where Sebastian lives. Lairs, might be the more appropriate term: human beings live in places. Sebastian Shaw’s a monster.  
  
Sebastian hasn’t texted him any new address, so it’ll be the same place, that vast decrepit building that’d once served as a Prohibition-era bordello, all red velvet and ruffled debauchery, and these days echoes with rotting decadence and useless space. Sebastian’d loved the building, had loved to imagine all the most depraved acts that might’ve taken place; had turned the bottom floor into his workshop, lurid splashes of color on canvas, blasphemous against the faded weariness of history.  
  
Sebastian’s likely keeping Charles on the third floor, in one of the renovated bedrooms, but in which one precisely Erik doesn’t know. If he did, he’d be there now, smashing through windows and breaking Charles free of cruel metal and rescuing him on the spot. But he _doesn’t_ know, and there’re too many options, and if Sebastian catches him then Charles will be the one to suffer.  
  
They’ll be meeting in Sebastian’s office, though, as arranged via text. Sebastian’s space. Where he feels in control.  
  
Control. He stares at the computer screen, dimmed now, for a pair of heartbeats.  
  
All he can see is Charles. Not the bruised and tortured body in the photographs, but Charles laughing, whole and safe and alive, glancing up at him over a book with a sudden quick smile; Charles just before capturing Erik’s queen on a black square, all intently focused delight; Charles in the afterglow of orgasm, flushed and beautiful and worn out and thoroughly pleasured, forgetting to rebuild all those walls amid the contentment…  
  
Charles is alone with Sebastian Shaw and is very badly hurt and doesn’t know that Erik loves him, because Erik’s not managed to say those words, and why hasn’t he said those words, why couldn’t he just say them out loud when blue eyes were in his studio or his bed or under the sunshine, they’re true words and Charles needs to hear them and why hadn’t he—  
  
No. Focus. He’s got an hour. Less, now.  
  
He knows how to use a gun, but he doesn’t own one, these days. He’d had one for the first few years he’d been out of Sebastian’s clutches, fearing reprisals; somewhere along the way, amid the yoga and the joy of creation and the lack of any retribution, he’d thrown it out, hoping for peace.  
  
The welding torch is no doubt too obvious. Unfortunate, that.  
  
He does own a few knives, and some very pointed sculpting tools. He considers them.  
  
He doesn’t know what Sebastian wants, other than to have him back, to prove some sort of twisted point about ownership. But he’s under no illusions that he and Charles will simply be allowed to leave.  
  
Sebastian, he remembers, had talked about explosives. Dynamite. What he’d called real social change. The reasons Erik’d finally walked away, when he’d stayed even after his mother’s death because he’d not known where else to go.  
  
Sebastian’d wanted to blow up the institutions of society. Police stations. Schools. _Hospitals_.  
  
Erik, who had back then believed equally fiercely in the need for the world to change, for equality and justice and an end to ignorance and stupidity and institutionalized bigotry, had said, flatly, you’re insane, and had turned his back on the studio and the plans that involved demolishing the hospital that’d guarded his mother’s failing life.  
  
Nothing ever had happened, not that he’d heard. More of Sebastian’s grandiose plans failing to reach fruition. Erik’d laughed to himself, and watched his own art sell for increasingly impressive amounts, and seen fewer and fewer pieces of Sebastian’s displayed anywhere, over the years.  
  
He does believe that Sebastian Shaw is very likely capable of anything.  
  
He looks at his assorted makeshift sharp-object collection again.  
  
He might, as much as he hates to admit it, require assistance.  
  
He loathes the idea of asking, despises the thought of being dependent on anyone, owing another person anything. But this is for Charles.  
  
He can do anything, for Charles. Who accepts Erik’s arms around him in the night, and is no less strong for it.  
  
After some deliberation, he picks up the phone. He doesn’t call the police.  
  
When he tells Emma Frost what’s happened, she goes very quiet. It’s a promising kind of quiet. Lethal. “Sebastian Shaw.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“That man—”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“No, you don’t. He requested our services, once. Used an alias—something German—he provided a much younger picture of himself. Charles won’t remember—”  
  
 _“You let Charles—”_  
  
“I don’t let Charles do anything. But no. Even he wouldn’t—he looked at the file and told me no.” They both let that one sink in, in silence. “So I told Shaw we couldn’t accommodate his requests. They never met.”  
  
“Now they have.”  
  
There’s a pause, then. The night—it’s still the same night, how is it possible that he’d been thinking about drinks and dinner and making tea, only a few short minutes ago—is bitterly cold.  
  
“I never should have said yes to him taking your appointment, that night.”  
  
He has to make himself say it. The truth burns behind his eyes like unshed tears. Charles is in Sebastian’s hands because of him. “I know.”  
  
“You need to fix this.”  
  
“I know. I can’t—I can’t change my past. I can’t make this not have happened. But I’m going to save him. Because I love him. And I called you because you know everyone in this city, and you know who owes you all the favors, and you’re going to help me, because if you don’t _I’ll be coming to see you next.”_  
  
Emma Frost sighs. He can picture her lifting an exquisitely manicured eyebrow. “So passionate. Good heavens. No wonder Charles loves you; he needs that, from someone. Let me make a phone call or two; come over and meet me here in ten minutes. Be punctual.”  
  
“I’ll be there.” Ten minutes, out of his disappearing hour; but it’s on the way. And Frost sounds certain of those phone calls. “Thank y—he loves me? He—he said that?”  
  
“Of course not. He told me that you make him want to smile, and he was telling the complete and unedited truth, which I suspect you know is rather unusual, and so I feel fairly safe in suggesting that that’s the Charles equivalent of shouting that he loves you from a mountaintop. Nine minutes, Lehnsherr.”  
  
There’s a click as she hangs up. Erik stands there clutching the phone in one hand, stunned and hopeful and desperate, and then breathes in and mentally shakes himself into action and grabs a knife and his favorite chisel, things he can conceal but also fight with or throw if it comes down to that, and then runs for his car.  
  
The night’s black and lowering. No rain, not yet, but the clouds’re heavy overhead. Blocking out all the light. The air tastes of ozone and anguish and slick city streets.  
  
He gets to Frost’s tastefully noncommittal establishment in eight and a half minutes. Pushes open the doors, and then stops in place, literally speechless.  
  
So many people. And all of them turning to gaze at him.  
  
Emma, as expected, is at the front of the room. But there’s another woman beside her, talking to her, with long brown hair and the kind of poised professional physicality that suggests _government agent_ to Erik’s suspicious mind, and there’s a man in black next to her, and there’s a _crowd_ of Emma’s employees filling up the lobby, with expressions ranging from furious to vengeful to apprehensive to determined.  
  
Emma waves him over. “Erik Lehnsherr, meet Agent MacTaggart and her partner. Moira was Charles’s contact at the FBI. Tracing some of the children who’d made it onto official radar. Erik is Charles’s partner, and a very angry man.”  
  
Erik opens his mouth. No words seem prepared to emerge as yet. _Partner?_ is somewhere near the forefront, though.  
  
“Emma tells us you know Sebastian Shaw.” Agent MacTaggart’s voice is soft and feminine, but the steel beneath it is unyielding and sharp with tension. “That he’s hurt Charles.”  
  
“I—yes—sorry, who are you again?”  
  
“Charles cares about people.” She sounds as if she personally needs to ensure the world knows this. “He’s a good person. We were working a missing-persons case, a cold case that we didn’t expect to solve, when he called me the first time and told me he had files that could help. I know what he’s done to try to make up for his father’s crimes. He doesn’t deserve this.”  
  
“Besides,” notes her imperturbable partner, “if the rumors about Shaw are true, he’s a threat to national security.”  
  
“That too.”  
  
“Are those shoulders really Charles’s boyfriend?” calls someone from the miniature army of escorts and employees. Another voice chimes in, “Well, we can see why he’d retire, then, if he gets to have _that_ every day,” and there’s a swell of nervous amusement, laughter before the charge.  
  
“Frost,” Erik says.  
  
Emma Frost shrugs. “They want to come.”  
  
“It’s _Charles_ ,” points out a dark-haired girl with tattoos and the eyes of a fighter, from the front. “He paid my rent two months ago, when I was short.”  
  
“He asks about our families.”  
  
“My sister’s art classes—”  
  
“—my little brother’s surgery—”  
  
“He bought me dinner first, and then said I was the one who could say stop, whenever, if I didn’t want to hurt him—”  
  
From a cigar-chomping hirsute lumberjack-type in the back: “Kid’s been through enough crap. ’sides, he smells nice.”  
  
Erik very nearly hurls the closest blunt object at that speaker. But there’s one more, a lanky blond boy who’s spent time in and out of juvenile detention centers if not actual prison if Erik’s any judge, and this one says, surprisingly quiet, “Because he’s always let himself get hurt so we don’t have to. And this is our turn to help him.”  
  
And there’re nods around the room.  
  
Erik stands there looking at them all, every last one of them on Charles’s side. Searches for words in the expectant hush.  
  
He wishes Charles could see this. He wishes Charles were here. He wants to punch the one who made the smelling-nice comment in the face, except he can’t, because the man’s not wrong: Charles has enough scars.  
  
What would Charles, who told him on the night they met that art and struggles and pain could be about hope, say to them?  
  
He’s not Charles, though. No one else is.  
  
So he says, “Thank you,” and then he says, “We’re going to bring him back.” And they cheer.


	15. Erik Arrives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik and the avenging army arrive, Sebastian gets what he deserves, and Charles is amazing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for Sebastian being verbally nasty and Charles still being injured from the previous chapter, but that's it.

They’re not far away. They’ll be precisely on time. That’s important. It’s also important that Sebastian suspects nothing; that Sebastian sees exactly what he expects, which is Erik walking up to the front door, seemingly alone and there of his own free will.  
  
So that’s going to happen. But Erik also knows where the myriad side exits, installed for discreet departures of bygone businessmen, open; and he knows about the blind spots in Sebastian’s security system, because he’d watched the installation while Sebastian wandered off to contemplate world domination or whatever the hell monsters did in their spare time, too grand to be interested in the menial tasks of set-up and connection.  
  
He’d never said anything about the blind spots. He’d never _liked_ Sebastian.  
  
Agent MacTaggart’s brought a tracker, which Erik permits to be attached to his ankle. They’ll need to know where he is in the building. That’ll be where Charles and Shaw are, where they all meet; he assumes it’ll be the office, but it might not be.  
  
This is him working with the FBI. He can’t even protest, because Agent MacTaggart’s astoundingly efficient and capable and obviously cares about Charles and carries a gun.  
  
From a block away, as the first biting drops of rain begin to sting his face and neck, he sends his volunteer army, Charles’s army, around to the side. Tells them to wait ten minutes. Then takes a deep breath and stands up straight and walks through the rain to face his past.  
  
Not merely his past. His future. Because Charles is his future. And he’s here to get Charles back.  
  
The once-ornate front door is faded, gilt peeling like tears in long strips. It’s unlocked, which is unusually trusting; there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around, which is less surprising. It’s the dead of night—no, no, _no_ , wrong choice of words—and Sebastian’s not been too successful of late. No clients, no commissions, no young artists wanting to learn at his feet.  
  
There are a few covered easels, sheet-draped and watching him like apprehensive ghosts. He’s an intruder into their space, after so many years.  
  
His feet remember the way up the stairs. To Sebastian’s office.  
  
The decay’s reached even here: the carpet’s the same one he recalls, expensive then, tattered now. The paint’s a bit dingy. That desk is still solid, a thick four-legged beast that lurks at one end of the room. Even the smell is the same, that overpowering cologne Sebastian wore everywhere, pervading the rooms like the essence of banal petty evil.  
  
At first he thinks he’s imagining the increase in the strength of the scent; and then he turns, and Sebastian Shaw’s smiling at him from the doorway.  
  
It’s like nothing’s changed. It’s that same smile. Brushing years away, back to his young and angry self, seeing no other way out, taking Sebastian’s offered hand…  
  
No. Because things _have_ changed. Like the paint, peeling away to reveal the rotten wood underneath. And he knows now that he can always walk away.  
  
Except that he can’t. Not without Charles.  
  
“Ah, Erik. Always so prompt, when I call. Good to know you’ve not lost the habit.”  
  
“Where’s Charles?”  
  
“So direct, these days. Whatever happened to saying hello? Didn’t you miss me?”  
  
“No. Where is he?”  
  
A sigh. Melodramatic, put-upon. “I did want to talk to you first. To invite you to join us. I have plans, Erik, and I know you’ll enjoy them. You always did get excited about the idea of revolution.”  
  
“That was then. This is now. And I’m not you.” He counts seconds, minutes, in his head. How long before the cavalry arrives, now that his signal’s stopped moving? If they come too soon, if he doesn’t know where Charles is in this mausoleum—  
  
He’ll find Charles. That’s a fact. Never in question.  
  
The rain thunders against the window, weeping with all the force of the oncoming storm.  
  
Sebastian sighs again. “Will you be more amenable to listening if I tell you that he’s alive?”  
  
“No. You could be lying. Show me.” Inside, he’s chilled to the core. Alive. Not unhurt. As if that’s the best that can be said.  
  
“Well, you are intransigent. I rather like that, you know. I did good work, with you. Very well, wait here. Have a seat.”  
  
He doesn’t want a seat. He doesn’t pace, because that’s wasted motion, expended energy. But he fingers the knife, poking through the slit in his pocket. It’s a good knife. Well balanced. And he waits.  
  
Sebastian comes back through the door first. Followed by Charles.  
  
And all of Erik’s hard-won composure splinters apart into rage and grief and horror. He wants to scream his heartbreak into the exploding storm, as his world falls to pieces.  
  
Charles, his lips say, shaping the name, but no sound comes out. Oh, Charles. No.  
  
Charles is dressed again, at least, in his jeans and a thin white undershirt, though he’s barefoot; Sebastian catches him looking, and laughs. “He was cold. And I can be magnanimous. Afterglow, and all.”  
  
The words, Sebastian talking, barely penetrate at first. He’s seeing the rest of what Charles is wearing.  
  
Not the blindfold. Or the handcuffs.  
  
The collar. Sebastian has Charles on a leash and collar, and it’s a choke collar, the kind that will tighten if Charles pulls back against it—  
  
There’s a kind of dim roaring in his ears.  
  
And then the rest of the words seep in. “You—you— _Charles_ —”  
  
Charles says nothing. No change visible in what can be seen of his face, behind the blindfold.  
  
Sebastian laughs again. “Now we’re even, you see. Though…for one of Emma Frost’s whores…he was a bit disappointing. Took quite a lot of work to get him to even make a sound.”  
  
“You—that wasn’t—” He’s finding it hard to inhale. Concentrating on not ripping Sebastian’s lungs out with his bare hands. But there’s that leash, and that collar, and Charles is so eerily silent, and he can’t show weakness, not now, not in front of Sebastian.  
  
Sebastian’s holding a gun, loosely, in one hand. Not making a point of it; simply letting the fact be known.  
  
“We said we’d decide what to do with him together.” Hopefully coherent. He’s focusing on that blindfold. On the faint flicker of eye movement he thinks he can discern behind fabric, at the sound of his voice.  
  
Whoever tied that knot, almost certainly Sebastian, doesn’t know how to do blindfolds properly. He wonders whether Charles has figured out that he can see, a fraction, by looking straight down and out from underneath. Charles is certainly smart enough for that.  
  
But Charles hasn’t spoken. Hasn’t struggled. And there’s a dark bruise stretching evilly over one cheekbone.  
  
There’re more along his arms, between shirtsleeves and handcuffs. And all the others from the photographs, for the moment concealed beneath obscuring cloth. And what Sebastian just said, what’s been done to him—  
  
He can’t think about that. Not now. He’ll end up attacking Sebastian on the spot. Despite the gun.  
  
So he stands immobile while tiny shreds of his heart get carved off with every breath Charles takes. The scraps crumple up and shrivel away. Irreplaceable. Like the laughter in blue eyes.  
  
“So we did.” A casual stroll towards the desk, as if out for a pleasant afternoon jaunt; Charles follows without resisting. Somehow he’s still beautiful. Bruised and blindfolded, with Sebastian’s collar around his neck, he’s the strongest person in the room.  
  
Sebastian must see all that dignity too and be offended by it, because he pauses to yank on the leash. Charles, unable to anticipate, trips; falls into the desk, awkwardly, hands behind him. Sebastian snickers.  
  
Erik feels his eyes narrow. The tug hadn’t been at the right angle for that kind of fall; and has Charles scooped something off the desk, into handcuffed fingertips? He can’t quite tell.  
  
Sebastian has apparently not noticed. Pushes Charles to his knees; ties the leash securely around the top of one of the desk legs. Starts to walk away. For no evident reason other than malice, or perhaps wanting to demonstrate to them all who gets to dictate terms, stops. Delivers a casually vicious boot-heavy kick to the side of Charles’s knee.  
  
The joint gives way. The leg folds up. Charles collapses to the floor; the collar tightens, enough to visibly threaten his breathing. And he still doesn’t make a sound.  
  
Other, of course, than the sound a body makes, hitting the carpet. In pain.  
  
It’s a sound Erik knows instantly will haunt his dreams. For years to come.  
  
Sebastian glances at his face, smiles. Digs the boot in deeper. Crushing. There are noises.  
  
“Stop.”  
  
“Because you care? Come now, Erik. I know you only ever requested an escort in order to flaunt it in my face. It’s not as if you’ve had a relationship with this one. With anyone.”  
  
His knuckles are white with rage; he isn’t sure how much longer he can drag this out. “ _Stop_. _Now_.”  
  
A sigh, one more small contemptuous kick, but Sebastian does turn back to him. “So impatient, darling boy. Very well, shall we get to the point? I have him, if having a toy is any incentive for you; he has money. And the controlling interest in a company with military contracts and research and development labs. We always wanted to change the world; shall we?”  
  
Charles hasn’t moved. His face is turned away, into the wood of the desk, and his leg is—  
  
“I’m not interested,” Erik says, fingernails leaving crescents in his palm. “I left. I left you. I am not here to blow up the world. I am here for him.”  
  
“Pity there’s so little left of him.” Sebastian shrugs. “We’ll do it without you, Erik, but I did hope you’d join us. I’ve missed you.”  
  
“There is no we.” Where’s everyone else? How can this be taking so long?  
  
If Sebastian’s gun weren’t so blatantly obvious, if Charles could meet his eyes and nod, if he had any indication of hope at all, Erik would launch himself across the room at Sebastian and damn the consequences to himself. But he can’t. Not yet.  
  
“Charles is no part of your we. He won’t mindlessly make decisions to benefit you. He won’t give you anything.”  
  
“Erik, Erik. He already has. Would you like to know how he looks, when I tell him he’s a whore and he deserves every last bit of pain I can give him, and he comes at the touch of my hand? Would you like me to tell you how he sounds? We can compare notes.”  
  
No. Oh, no. Oh, Charles—  
  
No wonder Charles isn’t fighting back. That’s everything he’s been trying so hard to leave behind, pulled up out of his heart and presented to him all over again, by a man who knows exactly how to twist words so that they slide into the gaping space left behind and skewer that vulnerable internal organ, red and dripping.  
  
Erik knows precisely how talented Sebastian is at exploiting wounds. And Charles’s have only barely begun to close.  
  
 _Had_ begun to close. They’ll be chasms now. Bottomless, endless, hopeless.  
  
No. He won’t think that. Won’t let himself think that. Not Charles.  
  
“He’ll do anything I tell him to.” Sebastian’s eyes, horribly, are almost compassionate. “Because he believes he deserves it. Now. Given that…are you certain you won’t join us?”  
  
“I’m certain that you’re insane.” If the cavalry’s not coming, what can he use to get Charles free? The chisel in his left boot, the knife along his leg, accessible through his pocket—  
  
He’s almost close enough. Surreptitiously, he stretches a hand that direction.  
  
“I always imagined,” Sebastian tells him, reflectively, “that you’d be in my future. My greatest creation, you know. Erik the artist. All because of me.”  
  
“Maybe,” Erik says, because there is truth in the lies, deep down, “I was. Or I am. But I am choosing him, and not you. Let him go.”  
  
“That’s not a choice,” Sebastian snaps, true anger flaring at the recalcitrance, “he belongs to _me_ , and you’re not—”  
  
Erik grabs the knife-hilt and moves.  
  
There’s a dizzying second in which he thinks he might make it, might knock Sebastian off his feet and snatch the gun and shoot the bastard between the eyes with it, which he could do right now with no remorse, and then he’ll pull Charles into his arms and run—  
  
Sebastian keeps hold of the gun, and slams it into his face, and then aims it at Charles, finger on the trigger.  
  
Erik can’t move.  
  
The door slams open behind him. Moira MacTaggart, her taciturn partner, Emma, everyone.  
  
“FBI,” Moira says, _“put the gun down.”_  
  
Sebastian looks at Erik with venomous hatred, tinged with disbelief. “You called the authorities? You, of all people?”  
  
Erik, panting, feeling something wet and sticky on his cheekbone from the impact, manages, “Did you think I wouldn’t, for him?”  
  
“I’m disappointed in you.” And all at once that gun’s pointed at him. Up close, the barrel looks very large, and dangerous. “Would you die for him, also, Erik? Because I think that’s how this is going to go.”  
  
“Try it,” Moira growls, “and we’ll shoot you. We already have evidence of criminal conspiracy. Kidnapping. Child abuse—”  
  
“You can’t shoot me fast enough to stop him from dying too.”  
  
Moira hesitates, though her aim doesn’t wobble. There are infuriated rumbles from the avenging throng, but no ill-considered leaps forward.  
  
Erik, backed up against the wall, says, “Charles, I love you.”  
  
And Charles, from the floor, blindfold gone, hands somehow free, pushes himself up on his good leg and throws the handcuffs solidly at Sebastian’s head.  
  
The impact’s not enough to do any real damage. Charles is in pain and the angle is bad and the weight, though metal, is slight.  
  
But it _is_ metal. And Charles can throw very accurately, and quite hard.  
  
Sebastian stumbles, staggers, recovers; but the gun’s wavered, and both Moira’s and her partner’s haven’t.  
  
One shot hits him in the shoulder. The other one—Moira’s, judging from her expression—hits lower. Groin level. Neither’s fatal; but he’ll never hurt anyone again. Not the same way.  
  
Erik, only peripherally noticing the screams, flings himself across the space and onto the floor at Charles’s side.  
  
Charles is frighteningly immobile now, crumpled back down against the desk, eyes open but not quite focused on anything, except possibly Sebastian, who is now moaning very loudly and writhing and bleeding quite a lot onto the carpet.  
  
Erik doesn’t want Charles to look at Sebastian. Not ever again.  
  
His hands shake, unfastening the collar. Throwing it across the room. “Charles—you—are you—oh, no, _no_ , Charles—”  
  
No response.  
  
“Please,” he says. “Please. You—you saved my life. You—I don’t know what to do, Charles, please tell me, please talk to me, please say something, you know I wasn’t—I wasn’t with him, I wasn’t part of this, whatever he told you, you know that, you _have_ to know that, I love you, you saved me even if you believed what he—and I love you, Charles, _please_.”  
  
Charles blinks. Twice.  
  
Erik holds his breath, and those freckled hands. They’re cold. There’s a line of dried blood around one wrist.  
  
“Are you—does it hurt you to talk?” It might. In at least two ways. The bruises, and the everything else.  
  
Behind him, there’s a lot of commotion. Paramedics running up the stairs, Moira and Emma giving cool directions, waving them away from Sebastian and to Charles first.  
  
None of that’s important yet.  
  
“Charles,” he pleads. He’s begging, now. He can’t remember the last time he’s felt so helpless, so terrified. His heart is ripping itself in two, inch by inch, artery by artery.  
  
And Charles is bleeding. That wrist, that shattered knee, almost certainly other places, shrouded by the clothing.  
  
Charles blinks again, and says, barely a whisper, “Erik?”  
  
He’d been trying to breathe. The inhale catches in his throat, snagged on disbelief and the desperate painful return of hope. “Charles,” he shoves out, as his voice tries to close up. “Yes. I’m—here. Yes.”  
  
“You said…you said that…you said it first…you love me.”  
  
“I said—I do. I wanted to tell you—I would’ve told you, I was planning to, when we—I should have been telling you all along. I love you, Charles, I swear to you I do, I mean it. I’m—sorry. I’m so sorry. How bad—what did he—” He’s interrupted by paramedics. They take one look at Charles and say words like _hospital_ , and _shock_ , and _ambulance_.  
  
“Not yet.” Fingers curl around his. Holding on, despite the wounds. “Erik.”  
  
“You—hospital, Charles, please, I’ll be there, I’ll stay with you, let them—”  
  
“I love you,” Charles says, and Erik stops talking to stare at him wide-eyed.  
  
“I wanted to tell you that,” Charles says this time, voice frayed like unraveling thread, tapestries being unwoven into nothing, “I was thinking—the whole time—I don’t know if I can—I don’t know if we can—but I need to say it, I just kept thinking I needed to say it,” and then just shakes his head and falls into Erik’s arms, as they close around him.  
  
Erik tells him, “I love you,” and, “we can, we can do anything, we can get through this, you love me and I love you,” and believes as hard and as determinedly as he can, feeling the familiar weight of Charles’s body cradled against his, that that’s true.  
  
“Charles, what—how did you—you _did_ save my life, but how did you—”  
  
“Handcuffs,” Charles whispers, trembling. “Picked up a paper-clip—from the desk—I wasn’t sure I could manage it in time, my fingers were cold—oh, god, Erik, this hurts, I thought it couldn’t hurt worse but my leg—”  
  
“Don’t look at it—look at me, please, keep looking at me—You’re incredible. You—I love you, so much, Charles. And we need to get you to the hospital. I’ll be right here with you. I promise.”  
  
“So many people…”  
  
“They’re all here for you.”  
  
“I’m not…” Charles stops for air. Turns his head; leaves his face tucked into Erik’s chest. Not ready to process that yet, Erik understands, and his heart aches.  
  
But Charles is breathing, if ragged with pain, and alive. And says, “Hospital in a moment—I can’t—can you please hold me while I have a temporary breakdown, I think I’ve earned it, and you’re here, you did hear me say it, I love you,” and Erik finds a “yes—!” through all the tears on both sides and holds on to him, the two of them clinging to each other on the faded carpet amid the crash of the tempest and the wails of the ambulance-sirens outside.


	16. Erik, Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the hospital, holding of hands, hope. Also, Charles has a lot of friends, and Sebastian Shaw deserves everything he gets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for...discussion of non-con and recovery. That's it, though that probably applies from here on out.

Charles, by the time they reach the hospital, is barely awake, exhausted from the ordeal, the pain, the drugs they give him in the ambulance. Erik holds onto him, holds his hand when the doctors won’t let him any closer, and refuses to let go. After a few versions of _that_ particular glare, no one tries to make him.  
  
The consensus seems to be that Charles needs to be seen promptly, and will likely require surgery for that knee at the very least, but the injuries aren’t lifethreatening, and even the hospital staff’s a bit careful with him. Compassionate. Understanding. Aware that he might not want to be touched. Erik bites back his initial commentary—Charles is stronger than that—but Charles isn’t talking much, isn’t objecting to the carefulness. And so he doesn’t dare protest.  
  
A kind-eyed nurse offers to help him get into a hospital gown; blue eyes find Erik’s, mutely asking, and Erik says, “We’ll do it,” and she nods and waits outside.   
  
Charles shivers when pulling off the thin shirt, when the antiseptic air collides with darkening bruises; when Erik very gently unfastens his ruined jeans and eases them down, he bites his lip, and looks away. The bloodied towel slips free and Erik catches it without thinking and then understands what and why and feels a wave of sickening rage, so strong that he’s knocked physically off-balance for a second.  
  
“Erik—”  
  
“I’m—don’t worry about me. Please. I’m only thinking of every way I want to kill him. But you—” Words are inadequate. They scurry away and hide. Charles must be so badly hurt, that’s so much blood, he can’t even imagine—  
  
“It looks worse than it is.” Charles shuts his eyes. Doesn’t open them as Erik wraps the flimsy protection of the paper gown around him. “It was…after he let me shower. Some of that’s from the water, just…dripping. I’m sore, but I’m not—it’ll heal.”  
  
Still with closed eyes, though the voice is honest, open and vulnerable and too weary to be anything but truthful. And one hand reaches out for his. “You love me.”  
  
“Forever.”  
  
There’s a clatter outside. Raised voices. Charles doesn’t visibly flinch, but his hand in Erik’s tenses.  
  
“Do you want me to go check? I can, if you—”  
  
The door swings open. There’s a harried nurse, and Emma Frost of all people, and a gawky young man in street clothes and a borrowed white coat, and an older physician trying to tug at his sleeve. Erik fixes them all with his most intimidating scowl; only Emma seems unimpressed.  
  
“Charles, is Henry McCoy your personal physician?”  
  
“He doesn’t _have_ a personal physician on file and—”  
  
“Oh—he can be, yes,” Charles says, rather faintly. “I—Hank, what are you doing here? Yes, this is fine—but…”  
  
“Um,” the boy—young man, Erik supposes, if he’s a licensed medical practitioner, though he more resembles a worried rabbit—starts. “Miss Frost—is it Miss, I’m sorry, I—anyway, she called me, and of course I knew who she was but I never thought—” And then, focusing on the bruises and the knee with reassuring precision, “Someone hand me his chart and tell me what happened!”  
  
The rest of the doctors look at each other. Then there’s some hurried whispering consultation. Charles, propped up by helpful pillows, looks up at Erik. Erik sits there beside him, on the bed because no one’s going to say otherwise, and strokes a lock of hair gently out of those eyes, and feels his heart cracking with fury, with grief, with the need to do something, anything, to make this right.  
  
It’s a hospital. Another hospital. He’d said goodbye to his mother in a room that looked too much like this, while she closed her eyes and sighed and he couldn’t save her then and now he’s here again with Charles and Charles is hurt and it’s his fault and he can’t fix this either—  
  
“Erik,” Charles murmurs.   
  
“Do you need something? What can I—”  
  
“You came. For me.”  
  
“You—” He almost asks _how can you think I wouldn’t_ , then. Stops himself. He knows better. He knows Charles. “Of course I did. I love you.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says, and it’s unexpectedly warm. An affirmation. Some of the hollowness in his chest eases, at that. “I believed you would. And you did.”  
  
“You…” He stops. Looks at Charles, really looks at him, lying there fragile and wounded and surrounded by snowdrift sheets. Believing in him.  
  
His heart aches again, but it’s out of some other emotion this time.  
  
“Yes,” Charles repeats, as if he’s heard that thought. Maybe he has. Charles is, after all, incredible. And is squeezing his hand. “I love you, Erik.”  
  
“Yes…you do.” He lifts the hand to his lips. Kisses it, with conviction. An oath-taking, an acknowledgement, a vow. “I was planning to make tea for you.”  
  
“…tea?”  
  
“Tonight. I was thinking—I wanted to come home with you, and hold you, and make tea for you—that pineapple-hibiscus one you bought last week, that you were so excited about—and I’d kiss you, and tell you how happy I was, being in our home with you, and then I was planning to tell you that I love you—are you crying? Charles—”  
  
“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m only—”  
  
“You’re not fine—what’s wrong, please, what did I—”  
  
“Nothing.” Charles blinks rapidly, laughs a little in the overspill of emotion, shaking his head, unsteady joy reflecting in those eyes like sunrise over sapphires. “Nothing’s wrong, or not anything else, at least, I only—I want that too, I want all of that, with you, you’ll have to promise me to remember that when we’re home—”  
  
“I’ll remember—”  
  
“Charles?” That voice is Henry McCoy, evidently having triumphed over the other doctors. “I’m sorry, I know I’m interrupting, but we need to…er…I know the paramedics treated you, um, some, on the way over but we need a…a proper examination and I thought…you at least know me, and you don’t know them…”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, and goes very quiet.  
  
“In private, please.” McCoy glances at Erik apologetically. “If you wouldn’t mind—there might be—”  
  
“Not going _anywhere_ —” He pauses. “Charles?”  
  
That hand doesn’t let go of his. “Erik knows everything about me. And I’d…like him to stay.”  
  
McCoy plainly remains doubtful, but the cracked-gemstone eyes’re certain, and Erik is going to be an immovable object for as long as Charles would like him to be, so that is, decidedly, that.   
  
“Well,” Charles offers, transparent attempt at courage utterly heartbreaking, “shall we get this over with?”   
  
They do.   
  
The walls of the room are very white. Blank. Featureless. The equipment, standing by at the ready, is too dark in contrast.   
  
There’s metal in the frame of the bed, a strange utilitarian sculpture built for one purpose alone. Erik thinks about the stark grace of it, the kind of functional beauty it possesses, knowing its place. He has to think about that, because otherwise he might hear the soft “hmm” sounds McCoy makes, the tiny gasps of pain, the scratch of pen on paper, the low-voiced stumbling answers to questions about how much it hurts to breathe or sit up or move.  
  
Charles’s grip on his hand is very tight, and gets more so at one or two specific red-tinted moments. Dried blood and pale thighs. An inquiry to which Charles only shakes his head, and turns away.  
  
An eternity later, they’re done.  
  
Erik sits on the edge of the bed, in defiance of any hospital rules to the contrary. Slides one arm around trembling shoulders; Charles curls up against him, not exactly crying, but breathing unevenly, eyes wet around the corners.  
  
“I’m sorry,” McCoy ventures, into the motionless air. Erik nods, because he can hear the truthfulness in the words, and that should be acknowledged.  
  
He can’t bring himself to speak, though. The man’s caused Charles more pain, however necessary.  
  
Charles breathes, possibly to make up for Erik’s taciturnity, “Thank you, Hank,” though since the comment’s more or less directed at Erik’s shoulder, it’s even odds whether Hank in fact hears.  
  
Hank swallows. Shoves his glasses up on his nose. “You’ll be fine. I promise. Surgery in the morning, for that knee—we could do it now but I’d rather wait for a specialist, since it’s not urgent—”  
  
“It’s not what!”  
  
Charles sits up a little at that. “I know what he means, Erik, it’s all right. Is that—that’s all? As far as…”  
  
“As far as what,” Erik says, heart aching queerly. He knows.  
  
“I…think you should be…there’s some…tearing, but it’s not…I’m not a specialist in that one either, but I have seen, at the free clinic…you should heal. If it, um, doesn’t…if you don’t notice that it’s getting better, in a few days…then say so. We have options. But I think you’ll recover.”  
  
Charles nods, this time. Erik can’t recall words. There aren’t any right ones for this. Nowhere in the world.  
  
“There’re a lot of people outside who care about you. I’d suggest limiting your visitors and letting yourself recuperate, but, um. One or two of them look…government. And one’s Miss Frost. Er…”  
  
“She doesn’t mind Miss. You’d know by now if she did.” Charles finds a smile someplace, pulling it up to safety from the jaws of hell. “But you can call her Emma.”  
  
“I don’t actually think I can. I’ve got you on morphine, but I think I’ll dial the dosage back, you don’t have that much body mass…no offense, sorry, Charles…tell me if you’re in pain, okay?”  
  
“Hank?”  
  
McCoy stops, halfway out the door. “Yes?”  
  
“I…” Charles hesitates. “I know Emma called you, but—why did you come?”  
  
McCoy looks at Charles with the expression of a man faced with a important proclamation in foreign language. Then glances at Erik, presumably for help translating. “Because you’re hurt?”  
  
“I—but—”  
  
“You should,” Erik tells him, “have seen how many people _wanted_ to come along. I never realized I was in love with the patron saint of escorts and FBI agents, Charles.”  
  
“FBI—Moira was here? I did think I saw—oh— _ouch_ …”  
  
“Don’t sit up!”  
  
“Sorry…I’m…I can’t quite…”  
  
“Just breathe, you can, come on, in and out…like that…don’t move…better? Good. At least let me help, if you want to be upright. Yes, Moira’s here. I think she wants to talk to you when you’re feeling…”  
  
“Recovered?”  
  
“I’m sorry, Charles.”  
  
“No. It’s all right.” That hand is wrapped around his, tightly enough to indicate that it’s not all right, but that Charles is willing to let him see as much; that means something. Erik hopes it’s a good something. “I think I don’t understand, though. And I’m awfully tired…”  
  
“Then rest. Please. I’ll be here when you wake up.”  
  
“Mr Lehnsherr—Erik—” McCoy catches his gaze. “Can I talk to you for a moment? In private?”  
  
“I can’t leave him—”  
  
The subject of this concern looks up at Hank, all bruises and blue eyes and shock-white skin in the depths of the pillows. “It’s about me. Isn’t it?”  
  
“I,” Hank says. “Um.”  
  
“I want Erik to stay,” Charles says.  
  
“There—”  
  
“No, wait.” Charles pushes himself up more cautiously this time. “It’s important, or he wouldn’t ask. Can you…stay where I can see you? By the door?”  
  
Erik opens his mouth to say no; glances from one pair of eyes to another. Understands abruptly that this is also Charles trying, wanting to be strong enough, and Erik can’t take that away from him.  
  
“…fine. One minute.”  
  
Out in the hall, door left half-open, he crosses his arms. Bares his teeth, not quite a smile. The air smells of rubbing alcohol and cleanliness and steel. “Well?”  
  
McCoy sighs. Doesn’t quite meet Erik’s eyes. Not promising. “Well…the bruises, those’ll heal…two cracked ribs…that knee will heal as well, but it’ll take some time. Some rehabilitation. It may not ever be as strong as it was, but he’ll walk on it.” A pause. A shove at the glasses.  
  
“Other than that…he…um, there’s definite injury from…you were there for the exam. He was…”  
  
“He was raped.” Erik says it for him. Flatly. His voice feels oddly disconnected, as if it can’t believe what it’s saying either.  
  
“He…yes. From what he said, from the extent of the…damage…it wasn’t only once. There was a…an object, involved…” McCoy falters. Stops. They stand there looking at each other, under the dispassionate gleaming lights. There’s not anything else to say.  
  
Erik looks down first. Looks at his hands. They shake, just a small tremor, as he watches. They couldn’t help Charles. Couldn’t stop any of it. And in the end it’d been Charles who’d saved _him_.  
  
McCoy swallows. Sounds like it hurts.  “Listen. It’s not—it could be worse. I’ve seen worse. This is—it’s not good. But he will heal.”  
  
He nods. The words remain gone. They huddle up in a wet knot in his throat and refuse to come out, to let him breathe.  
  
“You care about him. Right?”  
  
“Of _course_ I fucking care about him—”  
  
“Then you need to be here.” McCoy’s face is still rabbit-like, but a determined rabbit now, ready to kick and bite and fight for a wounded patient. “I don’t know you. I don’t even know Charles, not that well—no one really knows Charles, or maybe you do, I don’t know. But I know he’s a good person. That’s not hard to see. And he’s going to need you, so if you can’t be here, if you’re going to leave, do it now. Because if you’re here, you’re here. For all of it. And if you hurt him I will personally make your life hell. Understand?”  
  
“…I’ll be here.” He would be offended by the implication, and in fact is, though it’s smothered somewhere under the heartache. But he does understand. Because he feels the same anger, the same horror, the same outrage at a world that’d let this happen to Charles. Who _is_ a good person. The best person Erik’s ever known.  
  
“I love him,” he says, and that’s the second time he’s said so on purpose to another human being besides the one included in that sentence. “I’m not going anywhere.”  
  
“Good.” One more glasses-nudge, even though they’re not sliding. “One more thing, then. I was…when I was…examining the extent of…those injuries….you know what I…”  
  
“I know what you mean, yes.”  
  
“Most sexual assault survivors don’t handle that easily. They cry, or they’re ashamed, or they’re afraid…”  
  
Which all would make sense. If Charles had done any of those. “Go on.”  
  
“Charles didn’t…he stopped talking, I know you know that, you were there. But that…that isn’t good. That he just didn’t…react. Like he didn’t think it mattered, when I touched him.” McCoy’s voice is unhappy. “I know it’s post-traumatic stress, and I know every person presents with different symptoms. But. I thought you should know.”  
  
Erik opens his mouth. Stops. Then shuts his eyes, just for a second, while the world spins on beneath his feet, while his head throbs from the draining adrenaline and fear and the physical collision with Sebastian’s gun; while Charles is lying still and small in hospital-issue sheets with a crushed knee and broken self-worth; while his own hands shudder at the sense-memory of leather and chain, hurling away the collar from that elegant bruised throat.  
  
Charles has been holding his hand, has been talking to him. That’s true, that must be true, Charles wouldn’t lie to him, Charles has to believe in Erik’s love—  
  
He’s horribly aware that that may not be enough. That Charles, who’d only just begun to laugh during sex, to look up and kiss him and smile, might not be able to see laughter anymore. Might retreat, pulling back into silence and resignation and grey lightless despair, where nothing matters, not hands on his body, not words falling into the empty void, not promises of forever.  
  
No. Every single defiant protective in-love atom of his being shouts the word. That won’t happen. He won’t allow it to.  
  
“Er…Mr Lehnsherr?”  
  
Henry McCoy. The present. Charles. He needs to get back to Charles.  
  
When he swallows, the dryness of the air sticks in his throat. “Tell me. How bad is it likely to be?”  
  
“I wish I knew.” McCoy raises one hand, as if to pat him consolingly on the shoulder; evidently thinks better of the gesture, and the hand hovers awkwardly mid-motion. “It’s different for everyone. Different circumstances, different individuals…some people are able to go on as if nothing’s happened. Some people need time and space to heal. Some people never heal, not fully; sexual activity may be beneficial, if Charles wants you, or he may want you but be unable to bring himself to act on those desires, or he may never want to have sex again. Or anything along the spectrum.”  
  
“I…whatever he wants. Anything he wants. I’ll be here.”  
  
“Tell him,” McCoy says, “not me,” but his expression’s compassionate, when he waves at the door.  
  
Erik hesitates, attempts a “Thank you”—Charles would say it—and then pushes the door all the way open and runs the few steps across the room to his heart.  
  
“Are you—”  
  
“I’m all right.” Charles holds out a hand; Erik takes it, kisses it, keeps it pressed to his lips for an inhale or two, just breathing in the reality of him. “I know you’ll be here.”  
  
“You—you weren’t—were you listening?”  
  
“Of course.” Charles manages to grin, though it’s not quite the same grin. Too many chasms behind those eyes. “You did say it was about me. I couldn’t really hear much, though. But you were very emphatic, a few times.”  
  
“You…know I meant that. All of it. Not going anywhere.” How much _did_ Charles hear? The parts about himself, about those injuries, about—  
  
He can’t ask, though. Not if Charles hasn’t overheard. He bites his lip, pushing back the question; sapphire eyes are watching his face. “You do believe me.”  
  
“You told Hank—when you didn’t think I could hear—that you love me.” Charles stops to breathe, winces, considers the IV in his arm thoughtfully. “Maybe I should ask Hank to increase that limit, after all…”  
  
“Are you in pain?”  
  
“Some…”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, “I’m so sorry.” He’ll drag Hank back here in the next ten seconds if those blue eyes make the request.  
  
“Not your fault.”  
  
“He was my—”  
  
“He was insane. I—are we using past tense? Was?”  
  
Erik starts to answer, then realizes that he doesn’t in fact know the answer, but because the universe has a natural sense of narrative timing, there’s a tap at the doorframe. It’s a very tactful sort of tap, as if the person’s unwilling to intrude but has to anyway.  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“Moira? Oh—Emma—Emma, I…” Charles trails off. Shakes his head. “Thank you. For—”  
  
“Don’t get sentimental,” Emma says, “I’m protecting an employee, Charles, you’re still consulting for me,” but her eyes’re suspiciously bright, like diamonds.  
  
“You are?” He’d not known that. “When—”  
  
“Right before—” Charles’s voice falters, stumbles, caught in quicksand; before Erik can try to throw a desperate rope, he recovers, and goes on. “I went to see Emma after you left. When I came home, he—Shaw—he was waiting for me. I never had a chance to tell you. Only consulting. Prospective clients. Is that—”  
  
“No, it’s fine, I know why you want to. And yes—I saw how many of them you’ve helped, and absolutely yes, and I’ll support you, I want to—”  
  
“Oh, good,” Emma observes dryly, “I get both of you,” and Erik glowers, but Charles smiles a little, so maybe that’s okay.  
  
“Charles,” Moira says, “how are you?” and then has the grace to look embarrassed by the question. “I mean—are you doing—okay? Everything you need?”  
  
“Tea might be nice,” Charles suggests, and Erik wants to kiss him, as Moira laughs and is reassured by this evidence of normality.  
  
“I’ll see what I can do. Would you…might you feel up to answering some questions, or giving us a written statement? Not _now_ , obviously,” she hastily edits, when Erik meaningfully lifts an eyebrow. “But it’ll be important for the prosecution.”  
  
“The prosecution…” Charles takes a deep breath, as much as injured ribs will permit. “What happened to—to him? What _will_ happen?”  
  
“Um…well, as far as I know, and I’m not a lawyer, I think we can convict him on charges of sedition, conspiracy—there were a lot of explosives and plans for setting them off—kidnapping, child abuse…”  
  
Charles glances at Erik, at that last one; Moira doesn’t miss it. “Yes, I mean you, and also some of the others. You weren’t of legal consenting age, and neither were at least three of the other boys he’s apparently had…relations with. It’s amazing how willing he is to talk, when we withhold his painkillers. He got seen by doctors and everything, we’re not being negligent, and he’ll heal, more or less, but it’s wonderful how the nurses end up getting angry when we casually mention what he’s accused of…Mr Lehnsherr, would you also be willing to give us a statement? We can do it without your testimony, but the more the better.”  
  
Erik blinks. Breathes. Processes. Sebastian, being publicly accused and convicted. Never allowed to twist or control or harm anyone again.  
  
“Yes,” he says. “I can.”  
  
“So can I,” Charles murmurs, and fingers tighten around Erik’s hand. “You don’t…you won’t need us to appear in person…”  
  
“No, I think we can spare you that. It’ll be a quick trial. Trust me.” Those last words’re delivered with weight. The FBI, Erik thinks, the government, connections; and younger him might’ve stood up and railed at this evidence of abuse of power, but here and now it’s personal, and maybe that makes him a hypocrite, but he can’t care, because he’s realized the relative importance of certain things, like love and Charles versus his own distrust of civil institutions, and he’ll do anything, break his own vows, be a hypocrite, accept aid and offer it, to keep Charles safe.   
  
No regrets. Not about that, anyway.   
  
Charles squeezes his fingers again, as if hearing those thoughts too.  
  
“So…life in prison, then? No parole?”  
  
“Most likely. He won’t have a very good time of it, considering what most inmates think of child molesters.”  
  
“And,” Emma notes, “his building, all his art…if one can refer to those ungainly monstrosities as art…that all seems to have burned down. After the police and FBI were through, of course.”  
  
Moira gives her a little nod. Erik decides that this last strange development, the two women having some sort of unspoken understanding, is just going to have to go uncommented. Too much else that’s more important.  
  
Like Charles, who’s still holding his hand.  
  
And who’s looking at Emma incredulously, from the heap of supportive pillow-fluff. “You…did you…burn down a building…on my behalf?”  
  
“Who, me?” Emma widens her eyes at them. “Sugar, if I’d done it, I’d take the credit. But, you understand…it was an old place, and those paints are so flammable, and someone brought a cigar, and there were so many upset people, after they saw you carried out, and heard the stories…well, it must’ve been an accident, of course. So easy for that to happen.”  
  
Erik wants to applaud, but one of his hands is occupied, so he settles for catching Emma’s gaze, in perfect understanding.  
  
“You _burned down a building_ ,” Charles says.   
  
Moira says, “Also, I shot his dick off.”  
  
Charles stares at her, utterly nonplussed. “You—sorry, you _what_?”  
  
“I shot him. In the genital area.” She makes a little waving motion in the air. “No more penis. All gone.”  
  
“Oh _god_ ,” Charles says, and then starts laughing, helpless and a little hysterical, and then the laughter suddenly turns into tears. “Erik—”  
  
He puts the other arm around shaking shoulders, too. Lets Charles hide the sobs in his chest, while his own eyes burn.  
  
Across the bed, Moira and Emma glance at each other, then soundlessly slip away. Erik’s grateful, and will thank them later. This time, this space, is for him and Charles.  
  
He holds on as tightly as he thinks might be safe, and lets Charles cry, letting everything out; whispers soft words, I love you and I’m here and we’re all right; murmurs small song-fragments and lullabies, in German he only barely recalls himself, snatches of melodies his mother used to hum before bed. Rubs Charles’s back, gently, no pressure, tracing slow circles and arcs and parabolae over frightened muscles.  
  
The sobs slow and spread out, small quivers and hiccups; Charles turns his head just enough to speak, while his hands very carefully fold themselves into Erik’s shirt and hold on in turn. Outside, beyond the room’s single square window, the stars glitter; the night’s growing paler, shimmering toward dawn. “I love you.”  
  
“And I love you.” He rests his cheek atop that shorter head. A loop of hair bounces up, inquisitive, to tap at his face. “Better?”  
  
“I…think so. For now. I feel…I don’t know how I feel. Tired. Afraid. Relieved. You’re here.”  
  
“Always. Afraid?”  
  
“I don’t know…”  
  
“It’s all right,” Erik tells him, “you don’t have to know everything all the time,” and Charles smiles, fractured, worn-out, luminous. “I thought…you rather liked me knowing things. About art. About books. Us.”  
  
“I do like you knowing that there’s an us. You, and me, Charles. Together.”  
  
“Even if I—if I’m not—if I can’t—”  
  
“You,” Erik says, into the dark silk of all that hair, warm against his lips, his skin, “can do anything. You saved my life with handcuffs and a paper-clip. If there are things that are difficult for you now, we’ll find a way around them. And if you are tired, you should rest. It’s my turn to protect you.”  
  
“You are,” Charles whispers into his chest. “You are.”  
  
“Hush. Rest. You’re having surgery in the morning.” Even though the words’ve sparked tiny glowing bonfires in his heart. Fierce and proud: he’s done this right, made Charles feel safer, somehow.  
  
“That—about that…”  
  
“I will love you no matter how many working knees you have, Charles. One, or two, or none.”  
  
“None, really…then you’d have to carry me everywhere…”  
  
“I am not seeing a downside to that.” One last quick kiss, to the top of that head. One of the playful strands of hair sneaks into his mouth, allowing him to taste it. “Go to sleep.”  
  
“Are you planning to stay here and hold me all night?” Charles sounds like he might be smiling again. “Not certain the hospital staff would approve. Erik?”  
  
“They can object if they want to. Yes?”  
  
“You…when I got the blindfold off, when I could see you…I’d thought I was scared before. But Shaw was holding a gun on you. And then…I didn’t have time to be afraid, then. But after, when I thought about how close…if I’d been a second slower…” Charles breathes out. “I can’t lose you.”  
  
“You never will.”  
  
“Shaw—what he did—Erik, I don’t know whether I can—”  
  
“Don’t. Not now. What did I tell you?”  
  
“…that you’re planning to frighten the hospital staff?”  
  
“No matter what, Charles. If there are things you can’t do, we’ll do what you can. Or experiment. Learn new things, together.”  
  
“Together…I like that idea.” Charles tips his head up, brushes lips to the line of Erik’s jaw. The touch, though light, sends a thrill down his spine: Charles is kissing him, wanting to kiss him, thinking about the future. Their future. “You did come for me. You fought him. For me.”  
  
“I’d’ve shot his dick off if Moira hadn’t done it first,” Erik says after a moment, completely honest, and Charles manages a watery laugh. “I believe you would.”  
  
“I love you. _Please_ rest.”  
  
And Charles nods, and settles more securely into his encircling arms. There, with the quiet beeps and hums of the equipment nestled around them, the echo of that laugh hanging in the night like the beginnings of hope, whispers back, “I love you,” and, trustingly, closes blue eyes.


	17. Charles, Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles is allowed home from the hospital. Healing. Lots of love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From here on out, the standard warning for recovery from injury and non-con.
> 
> Also, I will likely have to skip posting on Monday--my grandmother's in the hospital, and Awesome Husband and I are potentially flying out there over the weekend. (Still working out the logistics of this.) Normal schedule shall resume next Thursday. Promise. I already have most of it written.

Days pass. They pass in odd chunks, swift and slow. Charles finds himself sleeping more than he remembers having done in years. No wonder, he thinks, half cynical and half honest; he’s recovering from trauma, isn’t he?  
  
He is, though. In better moments, he believes that’s true.  
  
The surgery goes well. No complications. Erik’s waiting, hands and eyes tense, every line of that body coiled tight with repressed fear and ferocious love, when the kind-eyed nurse brings him back to the room. He’s foggy with the drugs and the exhaustion, but he manages to reach out a hand, toward the side of the bed. Erik makes a small helpless sound, and grabs it, and holds on.  
  
They tell him, the day after that, that he can go home. He’s sitting up, with the help of a few overstuffed pillows, and drinking tea because Erik’s procured some out of nowhere for him, and Hank looks as if he expects this to be good news, and Charles looks down into the herb-scented depths of his cup and feels his hand begin to shake.  
  
“Right,” Hank says, “I’ll just let you two talk about that,” and takes himself away.   
  
Erik dives for the tea before disaster can in fact happen. “Charles, what’s wrong? I thought you’d want to hear that. Do you not—do you not want to hear that? Would you rather stay here?” There’re unspoken words inside those: here where it’s safe, here where Sebastian Shaw never appeared on a doorstep, here where there aren’t reminders…  
  
He shuts his eyes. Breathes in and out. Listens to the echo of his own heartbeat, in his ears. Here. Alive. And Erik’s alive, and here, as well. At his side.  
  
Erik said the words. I love you. Said them first. Unprompted, no demands.  
  
“Charles,” Erik whispers. That faded elegant accent is shaken to the core. The supple voice cracks on his name. “Charles, please—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be asking you—that was too much, too many questions—you don’t need to say anything if you don’t want to, but please open your eyes, or—or hold my hand, please, Charles, I love you, please come back…”  
  
Eyes. Open. Right. He blinks at the careless whiteness of the hospital lights; focuses on Erik. Who breathes in, almost a gasp, and gazes at him as if trying to memorize every last freckle, every line, every eyelash and wayward loop of hair.  
  
“You found me tea.” His own voice isn’t terribly steady, either. But that’s okay. Possibly, maybe, that’s okay. “Earl Grey. Extra sugar.”  
  
“You said you wanted it…” Wistful, hopeful and afraid to be. In the background, the heart-rate monitor chirps. Rather belated, really, considering the panic attack’s been more or less averted. By Erik, and by tea.  
  
“I don’t want to stay here,” Charles tells him, because it’s say the words now or say them never. “I miss my bed. I miss sleeping next to you. I want to go home, and I’m scared.”  
  
“Oh, Charles.” Erik folds his hands around offered ones. Very different from his, Erik’s fingers: long and graceful and powerful, scarred and nicked with old souvenirs of metalwork, fire and tools and art. His own are shorter and broader and academic-pale, in comparison. But he does have scars, and more than before: there’s one on that wrist, under a snowy white bandage. From fighting against handcuffs.  
  
“I love you,” Erik says again. “Can you tell me what it is, that scares you? And thank you. For telling me that you are.”  
  
We agreed to be honest, Charles wants to say. I trust you. I love you, too. But his voice sticks in his throat, as his eyes burn, unexpectedly. He knows why he’s afraid. He’s not sure he can say it. Putting that thought into words will make it solid, audible, too real.  
  
“All right.” Erik stands up, not letting go of his hands; moves from the too-small chair to the side of the bed, and tilts an eyebrow, makes a small gesture: do you want me to hold you? Charles nods, and one strong arm wraps possessively around him.  
  
“You don’t have to say anything. You told me that you’d still like to sleep next to me.” Erik presses lips to his temple, very gently. “And that…Charles, I almost can’t believe it. That you’d feel safe with that…”  
  
“I feel safe with you.” It’s easier talking without having to meet those eyes, so full of love and apprehension. The monitor beeps quietly again. Charles wants to move his leg, his hip’s getting a bit tired of the same position, but he considers the wisdom of shifting the lower half of his body around, and doesn’t. “I never—you never would—would do that, to me—”  
  
“Of course not, never, Charles—!”  
  
“No, I mean—I think that’s what I mean.” He takes a deep breath. “You were the only one who never hurt me. And the only person I ever wanted in my bed—my own bed. I still want you in my bed. Not—not for—I don’t think I can—but I asked you to move in with me because I wanted you there and—” Oh god. Now he is crying, desperate, ugly, broken tears, spilling over all at once, the dam collapsing under the weight.  
  
“Charles,” Erik’s saying, “Charles, it’s all right, you can cry, I’m here, I’m not leaving, I’ve got you…”  
  
“No, that’s the problem, that’s why, you can’t—I told you I was scared and I’m scared because I asked you to move in and I want you to move in and you’ll say yes again but not because you want to, why would you, you’ll say yes because you don’t want to say no—”  
  
Erik’s grip on his shoulders loosens in shock.  
  
“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll be all right, I understand you won’t want to—to—”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, “I love you, and you’re brilliant, and you believe that I mean those things when I say them, and so please also believe me when I say that that may be the most ridiculous fucking thing you’ve ever said to me.”  
  
In the hush, one of the pillows slides off the side of the bed. Plops soundlessly to the floor.  
  
Charles stares at it. Being made of feathers and cotton sterility, it has no answers. But Erik shifts closer, trying to provide more support, his own body in place of escape-artist hospital bedding.  
  
His eyes burn hot and swollen, out of tears. His knee aches, and so do other places, fractured ribs, purpling bruises. That space between his legs, where the bleeding’s stopped but the memories linger.  
  
He shuts his eyes, because they’re scratchy and dry, and leans his head on Erik’s chest. Lets the words sink in, finding room deep inside his heart, profanity and all. Listens to the beat of that heart, worried and angry and speeding up for him.  
  
He says, “You want to move in with me.”  
  
“Yes, I do.” One hand strokes his hair, cautiously. “I said yes before any of this, you recall. Even more yes now. But not because I feel sorry for you—Charles, you saved me, you have to remember that—and not because I feel obligated to you. Because I want to wake up next to you, and I want to sleep beside you, and bring you tea when you are cold. I can tell you that every day if you need me to. I will. Understand?”  
  
“Your work…”  
  
“It can wait. I have commissions, yes, but you’re more important. If anyone doesn’t understand, then I don’t need their money.”  
  
Charles finds himself smiling, unexpected and small but genuine, at the conviction in that tone. “Thank you. And…about you saying so, every day…I might want that. If you won’t mind.”  
  
“Then I will.”  
  
“But, about your art…we talked about you moving everything over. The old greenhouse, the lab…whatever you need, for space…I want you to keep…creating. Don’t only take care of me. Please.” Erik will understand. He hopes.  
  
Erik sighs, softly. And a hand touches his face, fingers cool against hot eyelids. “I won’t leave you alone.”  
  
“Then…at least…can we go over plans for any renovation?” He turns his head. Leans into the touch; it’s very real. If he’d thought about it, he might not’ve wanted to, too much like a blindfold, a deprivation of sight; but Erik’s restrained soothing caresses are a far cry from Shaw’s rough cloth, and closer to something else. The kind of touch they might’ve shared before.  
  
“Renovation…” Extra implications, in that echo. Layers under that word. Reconstruction. Rebuilding. Repair.   
  
“Charles,” Erik asks, barely audible, taking a step into unsure ground, ashes and shadows, “may I kiss you?”  
  
“You have already, you know.” But he knows what Erik’s asking for, and so he tells his body not to flinch, lets himself _know_ how deeply he wants this, and he tips his head up and welcomes those lips when they find his.  
  
Erik kisses him with reverence, as if entrusted with a rare and priceless jewel, as if the wrong movement might end with shining shards irreparably scattered on the floor. Erik kisses him as if it’s the beginning of the world, the first delicate thin sunbeam at dawn.  
  
Well, Charles thinks, that’s a lovely metaphor; but it’s not right, either, it’s not what he wants. He wants to be all right; he wants to be himself, whoever that is; he’s been stripped down to the core and laid bare and it hurts like searing fire and all he’s left with is the elemental knowledge of three things: he’s in love with Erik. Erik’s in love with him. And he wants everything they once hoped for, together.  
  
He sits up a bit more—Erik pulls back, anxious—and wraps the IV-less hand around the back of Erik’s neck and yanks him back into the kiss, not holding back. Sunrise in vibrant technicolor, this time. Pink and blue and gold, setting the sky ablaze.  
  
Erik’s eyes go wide, but he doesn’t protest; he does, in fact, let out a noise akin to a hungry growl and wind a hand into Charles’s hair and slip his tongue into Charles’s mouth, assertive but not aggressive, exploring, discovering, staking his claim all over again. Charles thinks, yes, please, yours, not his, love you—and then stops thinking coherently and simply parts his lips even more and lets himself be loved.  
  
That’s a good day, in the end.  
  
They’re not all good days. He does come home, Erik at his side, the next morning; he’s in a wheelchair because his knee’s aching badly and he’s trying to stop needing heavy drugs, and that comes with the reappearance of the whole sledgehammer of pain; he looks at the waiting front steps and at his legs and wants to scream or cry or throw something in frustration, while the sun shines down upon his head.  
  
“Charles,” Erik tries, tentatively, “may I…can I carry you? Inside? I’ll come back for the…”  
  
“Fine.” He doesn’t mean to snap, and he’s instantly sorry, but. “I’m sorry,” he says, after Erik sets him down in his bed, nestled amid blue satin and pillows he knows, because he is, but it still comes out wrong somehow. Too petulant, cranky with pain and the sudden flash-flood of vision: a man on his doorstep, waiting for him to return…  
  
“It’s all right.” Erik touches his shoulder briefly, gets up, goes out, comes back, wheelchair safely stowed away. “I thought you’d rather be up here. I can bring you anything you need…or carry you downstairs…”  
  
“I don’t need anything.”  
  
“I…” Erik reaches out as if hoping to touch him once more; hesitates. “I can make you tea.”  
  
“I’m not thirsty.”  
  
Erik looks away, opens his mouth, bites a lip. Visibly hard. “You have books on the table, but if that’s not enough, or if you want your laptop…”  
  
“Are you planning to leave, then?”  
  
“I…wasn’t certain you wanted me here. I thought—never mind. Yes, I can stay. Do you want me to read to you? Or—”  
  
“I want to be able to stand up and walk up and down my own stairs, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. If you have something you want to do, you may as well go do it.”  
  
“Charles…” Erik stops, shakes his head. There’s one single sunbeam, very bright, pouring light across the floor, his shoulder, the foot of the bed they’ve shared. “I’m sorry. You’re hurt and it’s my fault and you’re angry and you have every right to be and I’m sorry. I love you. I was thinking that I should make a few phone calls. End the lease on my apartment. See what food we have, and what I can get delivered, because I’m not leaving you. I’ll go downstairs and leave you alone if you want that, but please tell me what you do want, because I don’t know.”  
  
“I,” Charles says, and then his voice catches in his throat because he doesn’t know either, and so he just says the only words he can remember. “I love you. I just—I’m sorry. I love you.”  
  
“And I love you.” Erik sits down on the side of the bed. Charles curls toward him, toward the sunbeam, as best he can. “Are you in…a lot of pain?”  
  
“I could use about fifty aspirin, I think…” He stretches out a hand; it finds Erik’s thigh. “It’s healing. I can tell.”  
  
“Not…you mean…not your leg.” Erik puts a hand on his back, connecting, rubbing away long-held tension: forgiveness, freely given. “Is that…good?”  
  
“That is what healing means, yes.” He traces random shapeless designs over that thigh, liking the way muscles tighten under his touch. “Looking at the steps…before we went inside…I thought I saw him. Only a shadow, only for a second…waiting.”  
  
Erik goes very still, the shocked protective readiness of a wild panther preparing to defend a mate. Unearths words, picking them one by one out of the depths: “Charles, he’s in prison, he’s…he won’t hurt you. He can’t hurt you. No one will. Not ever again. I swear that to you. Please believe me.”  
  
“I do.” He does. “But…I can know that and…not know it, at the same time. I know it doesn’t make sense. I don’t know how else to say it. I do also know you’re here.”  
  
Erik nods, after a moment. “It makes sense.” The hand drifts slowly lower. Trails warmth along his hip, his leg. Hovers, uncertain, above the brace surrounding his knee, a fortress wall behind which bones and tendons and new implants can try to put themselves back together. “I was thinking, about this…”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“We said renovations…those front steps…we could have them torn down. Replaced. They’re not very friendly.”  
  
“Replaced. By…a ramp, or…some sort of…”  
  
“That, yes.” Earnest enough that Charles can’t even be upset. And it’s logical: the knee will never be as strong as it was. On very bad days, he might need the assistance. He knows that, and Erik knows too.   
  
“But,” Erik’s continuing, words like sunlight, gold and shining with assurance, “mostly because I don’t want you to ever have to see him there again. Because he doesn’t deserve to be there, to be here, to have you thinking about him. So I’ll pull apart your whole house if you ask me to. And build you someplace new.”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, once he can talk. “Oh. Erik, I—yes.”  
  
“Your whole house, then?” Teasing, carefully, and the hand’s settled onto his hip now, finding a harbor, a resting place. The weight feels good there. Warm and true. “If you’re sure…”  
  
“Elevators,” Charles says, in reply. “At least one.”  
  
“Oh,” Erik says, borrowing his word, comprehension and regret behind those eyes. “Yes.”  
  
“No,” Charles tells him, “I mean, yes, for that, but also because…I’ve never actually had sex in an elevator. And I’ve always rather wanted to try. It’s sort of a fantasy.”  
  
It’s one hundred percent true, and made even better by the look on Erik’s face.  
  
“Honestly,” he adds, helpfully.   
  
“Charles…you…you…that…elevators? Seriously? But you can’t want—you can’t want to…”  
  
“Not any time soon.” He settles back into the pillows, winces as fading bruises collide with apologetic fluff, reaches for Erik’s hand and laces their fingers together. “And I…don’t think it’ll be easy. But you’re you. You’re not him. I trust you. And I want you. So yes, seriously. I probably need some time, but yes.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik breathes, “so much, Charles. As much time as you need. Whenever you want to try. I’ll be here. And I’ll always want you.”  
  
“And I love you. I think it’s some sort of office fantasy.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“The elevator idea.” He widens his eyes innocently at Erik. Is pleased to see that that still works, as those river-water eyes go dark with desire. “Possibly because I’ve never had a real job, you know, suits and ties and desks and all that, being proper and formal, and then taking every opportunity to be _im_ proper, behind closed doors, in an office, in an elevator…”  
  
“Oh god,” Erik says, a little weakly. “That’s unfair, Charles. That’s…”  
  
What it is is the first test. For himself. For Erik. For them. Whether he can say these things, can want Erik, can still have, if not everything, at least this.   
  
The sunbeam dances with dust flecks in the air, turning them all to sparkles and gilt.  
  
And the answer, he thinks, is yes. He can.  
  
“You should go make your phone calls,” he suggests, and now he’s trying not to laugh, at Erik’s baffled expression, at the abrupt lightness in his bones, the whole cracked but still spinning world. “If you’re getting groceries delivered, I want pizza. And you can hand me my laptop, and when you come back we’ll look up contractors together. Sound good?”  
  
“…yes?” Still startled, but with that same edge of joy beginning to tug at lips, hands, the corners of eyes. “Yes. I’ll be back in a few moments, then, after I’ve investigated your kitchen…Charles?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“In those fantasies…did you…were you wearing underwear? Beneath your extremely proper suit and tie?”  
  
“Oh…no, I think not. Because…the head of the company requested that I not, and he’s very strict. And I do try to be a good employee. To follow all the directions.”  
  
“I think,” Erik says, grinning now, wide and tooth-filled and happy, “that we should perhaps have some sort of private meeting. To evaluate your skill at…following directions. Is that…”  
  
“…all right? Yes. Other people in the office may notice when you send me back out to work missing my tie and unable to sit down, though. Erik?”  
  
Erik runs back over and picks up his hand and kisses it, apparently just because. “Still all right?”  
  
“Talking is good. Talking helps, I think. I can…think about it. Doing all of this, eventually, with you. I actually just wanted you to kiss me.”  
  
“I very much would like to kiss you,” Erik says, and touches their lips together, in the quiet gold-drenched air of the sunny morning.


	18. Erik Has A Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik has a nightmare, Erik and Charles have a much-needed conversation, and there's a lot of comfort. Also, some orgasms. Yep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> General warning for recovery after non-con, nothing explicit.
> 
> Also some thanks to [afrocurl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl) for a certain suggestion about a scene near the end. <3

It’s Erik who has, not the first, but the most terrifying, nightmare.  
  
Charles has been having nightmares, on and off, for weeks, for four weeks in fact, since they’d come home and tried to find intact driftwood to cling to in the tattered wreck. They’d both known enough to expect as much, after that ordeal; would’ve been more surprising if Charles hadn’t had nights full of ominous shapes and fear and blood.  
  
But Charles doesn’t tell him about them.  
  
Erik asks, when Charles awakens shaking and wan, breath so ragged Erik’s afraid he might pass out any second; Erik asks, because he doesn’t know what else to do, how to fight on after the battle’s won, against an enemy he can’t see, inside a head already full of terrible memories.  
  
Erik asks, voice shaking as badly as Charles is; and Charles gasps and gulps in air and shivers and reaches out, and Erik holds him against the monsters of the night, and Charles never offers details, only lets the tears slide down mutely and unstoppably as an avalanche, each drop a boulder when it crashes into Erik’s skin.  
  
He stops asking, after a while. If Charles can’t talk about it, doesn’t want to, he can’t push. If all he can do is hold out arms and be there when Charles needs him, he’ll never stop trying.  
  
The physical injuries mend, slowly. The bruises fade to yellow-green and then to brown, and eventually vanish altogether; cracked ribs knit, and Charles can sit up without flinching.   
  
The knee will take longer. It hurts, in a way that settles bone-deep behind those eyes and colors all the blue with anguish. Erik learns to recognize the bad days and the worse days, and works out a balance, through trial and error, of what Charles will accept having done for him, and what he won’t, and what Erik would like to do for him.   
  
Those three categories don’t entirely coincide, and there’s at least one truly magnificent argument over the infinite few-foot walk to the bathtub, but that one ends with Erik shouting, “I fucking liked carrying you places even before this, Charles, I like the way you feel in my arms, have you fucking forgotten that?” and Charles freezing in place, crumpled at the foot of the bed where he’d lost balance and slid to the carpet and let out a single strangled sob that’d stopped Erik’s heart; it ends with Charles looking up, eyes wide and wet as drowning sapphires unexpectedly thrown a rope, and then saying, “…I think I’d like to kiss you, if that’s—if you wouldn’t mind.”   
  
It ends once Erik’s gotten down on both knees on the carpet with him, leaning over in a tangle of frustration and love and earthshattering relief. Charles had whispered, tipping their heads together, “I do, I remember that, I always liked that too, thank you, Erik, I love you,” and Erik had felt dampness on his own cheeks and the kiss had tasted like saltwater and hope after all.  
  
A month later, Charles can manage walking, gingerly, with a helpful arm or furniture or a cane if really necessary. Can shower, instead of being eased into a bathtub, knee armored against immersion. It’s an enormously oversized tub, of course, like the rest of the opulent bathroom; but Erik can only be grateful for its assistance.  
  
He’d thought Charles might be uncomfortable, the first time, only a few short days out of the hospital and still wincing at every step, every inhale. Might not want to be naked, to be seen so exposed, even as Erik helped him to the edge of the tub. He was prepared to understand.  
  
But Charles hadn’t said anything then, either. Had lifted arms and let Erik peel off his shirt, exhaling softly at the pain; had balanced on one leg and let Erik help with sweatpants and nodded a yes when hands’d paused over shielding underwear.  
  
He’d remembered then, and remembers every subsequent day, Hank’s words: he just didn’t say anything, like he didn’t think it mattered…  
  
Charles had shut his eyes and settled into warm water—not hot; Erik’d been too afraid of too much heat washing over injured places, broken and bleeding places—and remained quiet. Heart aching, he’d murmured, “Do you want me to leave, you can call me when you’re done, I’ll be right outside,” and Charles had, after a second, shaken his head.  
  
Had reached for Erik’s hand, and held on.   
  
Had let Erik wash his hair, sitting there on the side of the tub, hands covered in fluffy white foam; when a thumb caught a stray tendril of shampoo before it could reach a closed eye, there’d been a smile, faint but evident.  
  
These days Charles can stand, and can shower, on his own. Doesn’t need him there. And Erik’s glad, of course he is, Charles is healing. That’s what he’s hoping for, begging the universe for, every night, every morning, every minute in between.  
  
But those small moments, those faint smiles, are vanishing as well. Charles gets into the shower by himself, and comes out of the bathroom fully dressed and limping, and Erik sits up on the bed and wants to run over and take his arm; wants to ask to join him in the shower, not for sex but because he misses the touch of that skin against his, the water-splashed freckles playing connect-the-dots with droplets, that tea-and-crumpets accent laughingly teasing him with the showerhead settings, deluge and rainfall and wave…  
  
He can’t ask. He’s been afraid to be naked around Charles for so long. No demands. No reminders. No feelings of guilt or loss or inadequacy should have to arise behind blue eyes.  
  
So he says nothing, and if Charles looks at him once or twice with lips parted a little sadly, well, Charles is likely thinking about the same things, wishing futilely for what they’d once had, and Erik never wants Charles to regret anything at all.  
  
So he tries to infuse all the kisses in those moments with some sort of reassurance: he’s _not_ asking for anything, not pressuring Charles into anything. He can accept whatever Charles has left to give, and that’ll be enough.  
  
Charles’s sister calls, the second week they’re home. Erik answers the phone because Charles is sleeping, exhausted from a physical therapy session, only his third and unforgivingly intense. Charles hadn’t wanted him to stay for the sessions; Erik’d opened his mouth, closed it, and taken himself off to the coffee shop around the corner, where he’d ordered the first thing on the menu and then stared at the frothy depths for an hour without drinking any.  
  
Charles is sweat-damp and worn-out and wobbling on his feet each time when Erik picks him up, but he smiles a bit, and actually talks, says it’s helping; said, that morning, that he’d managed ten more steps, and more than they thought he’d be up to.   
  
Erik had been driving and so couldn’t put both hands over his face and start crying in the middle of the freeway, so took one deep breath and then another and said “That’s good, that’s wonderful, of course you’re brilliant, tell me if you need to do practice exercises at home again,” and had set his hand on the gear-shift between them and hoped that Charles might put his own hand on top this time.  
  
Charles had, but only briefly, because a large truck had cut them off and Erik needed both hands to swerve out of the way, and after he’d finished shouting at the idiot in various languages, Charles wasn’t looking at him anymore, eyes wandering away out the window, gazing out at the bustling and active world.  
  
When the mobile phone does go off, shrilling noise into the fading gold of afternoon, Erik swears out loud and dives for the top of the dresser, scattering pennies and a few bits of wire and a paperback copy of _The Neverending Story_. The book lands on his foot; he snarls something very impolite at it, throws a frantic glance at Charles, who’s still immobile on the bed, and then snaps, “Hello?”  
  
“Charles—you’re not Charles!”  
  
“Erik Lehnsherr,” Erik says, because the screen’d said Raven when he’d picked it up, and he knows that therefore this is the sister.  
  
“Erik—oh my god you’re Charles’s Erik! Why isn’t he answering his phone? Why are _you_ answering his phone? Please don’t tell me if it’s anything I don’t want to know. And then tell me how you met. All the details. Charles wouldn’t give me any.”  
  
“I,” Erik says, and stops, hunting for words. “He’s asleep. He’s—he’s been hurt. He was—”  
  
 _“What the hell did you do?”_  
  
“I wasn’t—” I wasn’t the one who hurt him, he means to say, but that’s not right. Charles would’ve never met Sebastian if not for him. Had, according to Emma Frost, escaped that meeting once.   
  
“I’m trying to make it right,” he says instead. “I love him.” Truth. Every syllable.  
  
Over the phone, Raven takes a deep breath, and then says, “I think you need to tell me everything,” and so he does.  
  
She’s quiet for some time, when he finishes. Charles, on the bed, hasn’t stirred. The immobility of total fatigue.  
  
“I’ll come out there,” she says.   
  
“Thank you—but—I don’t know—”  
  
“I’ll stay in a hotel. I hate that house. And Charles…I love him, but we’re not…close. He doesn’t let anyone get close.” A pause. “Maybe now he does. I still can’t quite picture my brother in love, really in love, I mean, with anyone, you know. No offense.”  
  
“None taken.” It’s not. He’s thinking about Charles also, about the old scars inside blue depths, crooked ridges along the ocean floor, ancient and lightless. About how easy it is for Charles to accept whatever his clients once wanted to do to him, and the startlement in face, voice, pose, every time Erik _doesn’t_ want to cause him pain.  
  
But Charles _had_ been trying. Bookshops and cupcakes and moving in together. Charles had wanted him, then. Surely that’s not gone. Surely he can get Charles to want him, to admit to wanting him, again.  
  
The dusty gold light of the afternoon shimmers, even through closed drapes. Sneaks out through a crack to run along the floor, to announce: I’m watching you try to take care of him. Try harder.  
  
Raven says, “I’ll ask for time off after we finish this shoot, I can’t leave earlier, no one else can do foundation like I can, but that’s why I called, because I was thinking I’d come see you two anyway in a couple weeks,” and Erik nods even though she can’t see it and promises to ask him when he wakes. She tells him good-bye and good luck and hangs up the phone; Erik gazes at Charles, and comes back to the bed, phone in hand in case it goes off again, and sits down beside him, while the familiar heartache diffuses all through his body, weariness and loneliness and powerlessness and the fear of hope.  
  
Charles stirs. “…phone?”  
  
“Your sister called. She…would like to come see you. Us. In a week or two. You don’t have to answer now; go back to sleep.”  
  
“She wants to come here?”  
  
“She said she’d stay in a hotel.” He sets the phone on the bedside table. Rests his hand precisely halfway between them, an invitation if Charles feels up to taking it. “I told her I would ask you.”  
  
“Well,” Charles says, and reaches out, fingertips brushing tentatively over Erik’s, then curling around and holding on, “if she wants to come.”  
  
Erik holds his hand as he drifts back into sleep, holds on more tightly as the breathing changes, rapid and fearful and unsteady. Whispers, “I’m here,” when blue eyes fly open, shocked awake by whatever horrors run through his dreams.   
  
Charles nods and permits himself to be cradled in strong arms and, a while later, even smiles, when Erik produces the electric kettle and plugs it in in the bedroom and presents him with that previously-unopened pineapple tea.  
  
“I love you,” Charles tells him, sitting up, wrapped in blankets like armor against the crispness of the oncoming twilight. Erik answers “I know” because he believes that, he does, and then, “I love you, Charles, here,” and hands over a mug scented with tropical fruit and sweet hot steam.  
  
Charles smiles one more time, but it might be directed at the tea, or the night, or even the frayed paperback fantasy novel when Erik picks it up off the floor. He doesn’t know what Charles is thinking.  
  
The days turn into weeks, inexorably.   
  
The physical therapy does have an effect; he can see the benefits in the way Charles moves, sits, stands. At least something’s working. Erik tells himself that maybe he’s helping somehow too, even if it’s only driving Charles back and forth to the sessions.  
  
They look into remodeling costs for the house, some days. Charles seems eager but oddly uncertain, wanting to speculate about hypothetical new front porches and watch Erik get excited about architecture and plans and spreadsheets with numbers. Erik tries to be excited because he _is_ , he wants this if it’ll make life easier for Charles, if it’ll let them have a life together, and he wants to be excited because he gets the impression that Charles feels reassured if he is.   
  
Those wounded-ocean eyes are diffident, though, when asked their opinion about various stone finishes and design options and contractor reputations. Hesitant. As if constantly waiting for the spreadsheets and the stonework and Erik’s presence to all become unreal.  
  
Hank and Moira and Emma and a parade of various well-wishers come by. Charles sees them all, graciously enough, but he gets tired fast, and they never stay long. Hank catches Erik’s gaze, leaving. Erik understands, but doesn’t understand what to do. What anyone might be able to do.  
  
The chess set, on the left-hand bedside table, grows dusty with disuse.  
  
And, a month to the day after that initial homecoming, it’s Erik who dreams of Sebastian Shaw.  
  
He’s lying in bed beside Charles, fully dressed as he always is these nights; he’s holding one freckled hand because he’s allowed that much, and he’s determinedly keeping his legs away from any approach to an injured knee, and he falls asleep some indeterminate time after Charles finally does, and the nightmare’s waiting.  
  
In the grey-hued spider’s-web of it, he’s backed up against the wall in that too-recognizable office. The same way he’d been on that night. And it is the same night; he knows it is, with the clarity of dreams. He’s there, again. And so is Charles, on the floor.  
  
He can taste the rotten cologne when he breathes, and he’s looking down the steel-hued barrel of Sebastian’s gun, everything the same, but it’s not the same, it’s wrong, because Charles hasn’t moved, because he’s too late this time, Charles is too badly hurt, isn’t getting up…  
  
Sebastian laughs when Erik tries to get out the I love you, and shoots him through the heart.  
  
The bullet pierces him and pins him in place in a fountain of blood, and because he’s dead he can’t move, he’s trapped in place, but he can see because ghosts can still see, and what he can see is Sebastian turning to Charles, the trigger drawing back as Charles lifts his head, the deadly click of release just as those lips move, shaping a name, saying Erik—  
  
“Erik!”  
  
He gasps. Jerks upright. Opens his eyes.  
  
Charles. There beside him. Eyes anxious through the indigo night. Propped up on one elbow, not moving the lower half of his body in deference to the leg brace, but reaching out—reaching out!—to rest a hand on his arm.   
  
“Erik, I’m here. I’m fine. It’s just a dream, you’re dreaming, it’s all right. Look at me.”  
  
He can’t do anything else. Can only sit there drinking in the sight of him: real, breathing, blood pumping through his veins and not spilling across the carpet in a ruined office, the devastation of everything…  
  
“Erik,” Charles tries again. “Listen to me, all right? You’re here, you’re in bed, with me…”  
  
“I know.” Shaking. He scrubs his hands over his face. “I know. You—did I wake you? I’m sorry, Charles. I—”  
  
“It’s fine.” Charles sits up as well. One-handed, coaxes his leg into accepting the adjusted position. The velvety greys and blacks of the night tangle in his hair, pour over his bare arms, exposed by shirtsleeves. “I’ve certainly done it to you. I don’t mind.”  
  
“I do.”  
  
A lip-bite, a glance away; Erik almost apologizes, but then Charles is scooting closer to him across the acres of bed, leaning in, intent. “I am here. Do you want to tell me?”  
  
“I…no.” He can’t. Not this. Charles doesn’t need to hear this. Not on top of everything else.  
  
“Oh…” Charles worries at his lower lip again. It’s likely turning pink, though in the lack of light that’s invisible. “Can I get you anything? Water, or a drink, or…”  
  
God. No. “…no. Just rest. Please. You had a tiring day.” He’d been there, picking Charles up from therapy. It’d not gone well.  
  
There’s a silence. It stretches out beyond the bedposts, and fills the room with unspeaking.  
  
And then Charles says, practically inaudible, “I _have_ done this to you, haven’t I.”  
  
“What—waking me up in the night? That’s hardly your fault—”  
  
“No.” An indrawn breath, a shift of weight on the patient mattress. “No, this…this is how you’ve been feeling, isn’t it? When you ask me whether I can talk to you?”  
  
“No,” Erik gets out, as swiftly as he can. “No, Charles, listen, I’m not blaming you, I’m not asking you to talk if you can’t—”  
  
“I’d like it,” Charles says into the silence, splintering it apart, “if you would talk to me.”  
  
“You…would?”  
  
“Yes, I would.” Eyes washed pale by a single streak of spindrift moonlight, that damned curtain-crack at work again, meet his. “I love you, Erik. I want to—I want to be here for you. I know I haven’t been. And I’m sorry. I would—please let me try.”  
  
There’s another pause, and it’s still clumsy, but it’s clumsy with possibilities now and those outweigh the despair.  
  
This is Charles being brave. Asking for something. Asking to be allowed to help, to be treated like he’s capable of helping someone else.  
  
“I lost you,” Erik says at last. “In that dream. I’m losing you.” Too blunt. Uncushioned. Because he’s afraid it’s too true.  
  
Charles doesn’t say anything right away, and his heart cracks open, one more fault line, and wider this time. Not quite the apocalyptic break, not yet, but the end’s quivering a hairsbreadth away.  
  
Charles gazes at him, through the silvery shadows. “Can I tell you something?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
A smile, or the next-door neighbor to it, in the dark. Charles smiling, he thinks, and even though it’s not the same smile he remembers, his foolish heart wants to mend a bit of itself anyway at the sight.  
  
Charles holds out a hand. It’s the one that’d been sliced open, once, by a broken mug; wounded, on the morning they’d shattered with ugly words and a lack of trust. It’s healed now. There’s barely even a scar; Erik only sees the thin pale line because he knows where to look for it.  
  
Charles asked him to come in, then. And they’d found a way to start over.  
  
He sets his hand in the open one. Closes his fingers around freckles; they’re a little cold, and maybe if he holds on tightly enough they’ll get warm.  
  
Charles says quietly, “They’re always too cold, when I have those dreams,” and for a second Erik wonders when Charles acquired telepathy to go along with all his other spectacular qualities. Charles smiles again, more openly amused this time, over and around the pain.  
  
“I know you think I dream about him. And that’s…not untrue. He’s there. But what I dream about…my hands’re too cold, too clumsy, I drop the paper-clip, when I’m trying…I can hear you—I could hear you, then. Fighting him. And I couldn’t see you, and I had to not imagine it, I couldn’t be distracted, because I might not be in time…I hear you say you love me, and—in those dreams—I’m not fast enough. Over and over, every time I’m too slow or too awkward or too lost in my own—being hurt—I lose you.”  
  
Erik’s wordless. Shocked. Profound blankness, as if he’d entered a duel expecting a sword-fight and instead been shot through the heart with a bullet from fifty paces away.  
  
He’d thought Charles must’ve been recalling Sebastian, reliving whatever horrors had gone on in those lightless hours. He’d never guessed at this.  
  
“Charles,” he says, pulling phrases out of the air and desperation. “I’m here. You’re here, and I’m here, and you _were_ fast enough.”  
  
“I nearly wasn’t.”  
  
“And I nearly got us both shot. But it didn’t happen. We’re alive. Because of you. And I love you. You asked me to tell you that every day. I can tell you every night, as well, if you’d like that. Please just…please think about that.” He glances at their hands, where fingers join. Charles must be looking too, because when Erik looks up, he catches jewel-box eyes mirroring the motion.  
  
“Thank you,” he adds, because he means it, and the eyes look surprised. “For what?”  
  
“For telling me. I can—I don’t know what I can do. But I can listen. I want to listen. Please talk to me.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Charles admits, to the dark, to the cold. “I don’t know what to—I don’t know what to ask you for. I feel…like I should feel worse, I know it was horrific, but I can’t let myself—there are things I haven’t told you. That I can’t tell you, because you—I don’t know what you’ll do. And I’m scared, Erik, I’m sorry…”  
  
“Please,” Erik says again, and increases his grip on the hand. “You can feel that, correct?”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“Whatever you tell me, that won’t change. I love you, Charles. I wanted you when I first saw you, and I want you now, and I will want however much of you you tell me I can have. Forever.”  
  
“Will you,” Charles breathes, half a sob, “when I tell you this…what he did to me, with me…”  
  
“He hurt you. He—he forced you into sex, that’s not your fault, he had you in fucking handcuffs and a collar—”  
  
“He made me get off,” Charles whispers. “While he fucked me. And I did. I had an orgasm, Erik, I got off when he had his cock inside me and his hand on my throat, and he called me a whore, and told me I deserved it, and I do, Erik, I’m everything he said, because I _did_ —”  
  
“…you _are not!”_   
  
“But—”  
  
“Listen!” He’s reaching out before he can think twice about it, fingers finding that pointed chin, lifting it until Charles meets his gaze. He’s absolutely horrified, sick inside, but not because of Charles, never because of Charles. Because of what Sebastian’s done to him. To them.  
  
“Listen,” he says again, trying to keep all the fury from erupting in his voice. “He hurt you, Charles. He knew exactly how to hurt you. That’s what he does.”  
  
“I’ve been hurt before.” Those eyes slide away from his. Something unmoored, beyond the blue. A gate, hinges broken, swinging. “I enjoy it.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik demands, and shifts position too, other hand joining the first, so he’s sitting up on the bed stroking tears away from both of those cheeks with his thumbs, “you _know_ that isn’t true.”  
  
“I don’t—”  
  
“I know you’ve been hurt before. I know you’ll tell me you wanted it. But there is a difference. You never—you always at least knew what you were doing, before. And this—” They can argue about the line of dubious consent later. This is beyond any of that, what Sebastian did to Charles.   
  
“This isn’t your fault,” he finishes, with as much conviction as he can force into four short words. “This isn’t anything you ever asked for.”  
  
Charles makes a sound that’s not quite a snort and not quite a sob. “I know. I’m quite sure that being handcuffed to a mattress and—well. I’m very sure I didn’t ask for that.”  
  
“I’m so sorry. I—I don’t know what to say, Charles, how to make this—not all right, but—better. For you. I—he was my problem. My past. And I—this happened to you because of me.” He rubs his thumbs over fair skin, imagining he can feel each sparkling freckle through touch alone. Wonders whether he ought to let go. But Charles hasn’t pulled away.  
  
“You said no, right? You didn’t want to? You didn’t want him. And he knew that. He did this. To you.” Still not enough; Charles is swallowing hard, fighting back tears.  
  
“All right. You—look at me, please. That’s—if I make that a request—not an order—will you try?”  
  
He waits; Charles blinks, looking astonished, and then nods.  
  
“Good. You…yes, you sometimes like…being pushed. You like it, when I’m rough with you, when it’s intense. Right?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles breathes. “Yes, and that’s—I was—”  
  
“He knew that about you, too. And he knows how to get what he wants; I slept with him, Charles, remember, I know. You had a physical reaction. To what he did. You never said yes. You never wanted him.”  
  
Charles is looking at him now as if seeing an oasis in the desert: disbelieving, but starting to think the glimmering far-off promise might be real. Might be reachable, this time.  
  
“If you need more…you told me once that you’d never felt the same way—the way you did with me—with anyone else. I believed you. I still do. And you know whether that’s true now. Whether you felt any of that, with him. Did you?”  
  
“No…I didn’t…nothing like that…like the way I feel with you. Erik?”  
  
“I love you. What can I do for you?”  
  
“You…” A laugh, tiny, incredulous, almost unrecognizable. “Tell me I’m still yours. Please. Sir.”  
  
“You—wait, you don’t have to say—”  
  
“I know.” Charles lifts a hand, touches the back of Erik’s, where it’s still cupping his cheek. “I…want to. I’ve missed you. Touching you…”  
  
“I’ve wanted to touch you. I would’ve followed you into the shower, today, or yesterday, or any of those times…I want you to know you’re safe, with me. And…” He turns his hand, captures that curious wrist, keeping his grip light and easily broken. Charles doesn’t object, only looks up at him, smile flickering ghostlike around the corners of those lips. “You _are_ mine. If you want to be. Only if you want to be. And if you say yes…that means all of you. Because I want all of you. Including everything you’ve just told me. Understand?”  
  
“I…think so. Yes.” It’s beginning to be a real smile now. Reflected in those eyes, behind wet eyelashes, shining brilliant and blue. “Yes, I understand. And yes, I agree. Sir?”  
  
“I love you.” He wants to smile, too, and to laugh, and to cry, all at once. “Do you need me to say it again? I did promise you I would.”  
  
“I know you would. And I want to hear it. But…right now…can I…can we try something? You can say no.”  
  
“It’ll help if you ask me first,” Erik tells him, and taps fingers over that happily captive wrist, and Charles laughs, and then stops, looking surprised, and then laughs again at the surprise, and Erik says “Can I kiss you?” because he has to, he needs it like water or air, and when Charles nods he leans over and finds those lips still quivering with merriment. They taste like rediscovered joy.  
  
After, with Charles securely tucked against his chest and enfolded by his arms, he inquires, “What were you going to ask me, then?”  
  
“Oh…” Charles tips his head up, lovely, worn-out, messy-haired in the stripe of moonlight. “I thought…I was thinking…you said you’d been thinking about me in the shower…”  
  
He has been, but he doesn’t remember phrasing it quite that way. “Go on.”  
  
“If you wanted…I wouldn’t mind you joining me. Not—not for sex—not yet, I can barely stand up—but I like touching you. Like this.”  
  
“So do I. I will, if you want me to.”  
  
“Yes, then. But for now…what I wanted to try…” A lip-lick, nervous and determined. “I can…what were you thinking, about me in the shower? Were you…picturing me under the water? With soap, perhaps? Soap would be…slippery. On my skin.”  
  
At first he can’t talk because his brain’s frozen on that image and is gleefully showing it to him in full ecstatic color. And then he can’t talk because Charles is offering this, Charles is trying to please him, Charles is feeling inadequate even now—  
  
“You—you don’t have to—I don’t need—please don’t do this because you think I need—”  
  
“I’m not. I’m doing this to…see if we can. I…did it for a client once, a very nice one, she asked me to talk while she took care of herself, and she got off without my ever touching her, to my descriptions, my voice…would you want that? Here, in the bed, if I talk to you?”  
  
“…you honestly want me to?” Himself wanting to is not going to be a problem. The arousal’s immediate at even the suggestion, and his cock’s pushing at the thin fabric of pyjama pants, impatient. His voice sounds rough, even to his own ears. “You can say no. You can—”  
  
“Erik,” Charles murmurs, and kisses him, a brief affectionate nibble at his jawline, his throat, “honestly yes. I want to.”  
  
“But…you…why? I mean why now. I mean…”  
  
“I know what you mean.” Charles sighs, but it’s not a sad sound. Contemplative, perhaps. “Because…I asked you once to take me upstairs and fuck me, when I needed an anchor, when I felt—lost—and you did, and you held me…I want to try again. For both of us.”  
  
“Then—yes, to all of that, I can be your anchor—then what do you need me to do?” He very much would like to put a hand on his aching cock, for example. But if Charles only wants to talk, they can do that. He can do that. He and his cock can do that.  
  
Charles glances at his lap, and there’s that smile again, playfully hovering around lips, eyes, the arch of an eyebrow. “Lie down? And…yes, touch yourself. I don’t think I can—not yet—but if you do it, while I watch…”  
  
“Oh god,” Erik says inadvertently, and then, “thank you,” and then, “are you _sure_ you’ve never wanted to tell me what to do, in bed,” because frankly Charles just gave him permission to wrap a hand around himself and stroke and that feels amazing.  
  
Charles hesitates, off-balance; he instantly regrets the words. “I’m sorry, I—”  
  
“No, it’s fine, I was only thinking…I’m not…I can, if you want, but it’s not…”  
  
“…what you need. I’m sorry. That was stupid, Charles, go on, it’s all right.”  
  
“If you want…” One more little lip-lick, thoughtful this time. “You could tell me to tell you what to do. Make it an order. That might work, sometime. But not now. Now…”  
  
“Now you want me to think about you in the shower?” The desire’s back, full force. They’re still good. They’re good and Charles is thinking about the future, about them having a future, and he’s picturing Charles in the shower and Charles loves him.  
  
“Yes, sir.” The blue eyes are bright, even in the shadowy night, as they find his. Not frightened. Anticipatory. Charles is watching his face, not his hand, as he runs it along the length of his erection, through the cotton fabric. “I want you to…picture me there, wet and—and naked, sir, soap on my hands, my skin…what would you tell me to do? If you walked in on me, then?”  
  
“What would I tell you to…” He rubs his thumb lazily over the head of his cock, where there’s already wetness making the fabric cling. Imagines it being Charles’s hand; someday, perhaps. Maybe even soon. And the idea sends fireworks along his spine, even though he’s lying down.  
  
Charles slides down, too, so they’re back to being the same height. Obviously, waits for more.  
  
Sentences. Right. He can manage that. “I would…I’d ask you to touch yourself. Because you clearly want to, don’t you, you’ve been thinking about it…”  
  
“Oh, you’d _ask_ …” But that smile’s appreciative, so that’s all right. “Since you’re being so polite, then…I couldn’t say no. I want you, sir. Should I show you how much? Use my hand, on my cock, hard, the way I like it, but slowly, so you can watch?”  
  
He can’t hold back the groan. Can’t help pushing upward, into the rhythm of his own hand. His body tingles with it; it’s been so long, weeks of fear and frustration and anxious strained silences, and now this, Charles saying they can have this again…He’s mortifyingly aware that he’s close already, whole length thick and hot and twitching at each stroke.  
  
“I could,” Charles muses, “reach back, with the other hand…we have got soap, and it’s not perfect, but it’ll do…I could get myself ready for you. A finger. Two. You could watch me slide them in…and out…under the water, dripping with it…”  
  
“Oh, fuck—”  
  
“Would you touch me?” That graceful faded-English voice sounds like the epitome of decadence in his ears. Tea and scones and propriety on the surface, and sheer dark wickedness shimmering beneath, smoke-tinted glass in cathedral windows. “Would you step into the shower with me, and push me up against the back wall, and bend me over and put your cock inside me, sir?”  
  
 _“Charles—”_  
  
“Tell me. What would you like to do to me?”  
  
“That’s—oh fuck—not fair, you said you’d talk—I mean—talk to me, Charles, orders, tell me you want me in you—”  
  
“I do,” Charles murmurs, and then takes a breath and lifts a hand and sets it atop Erik’s own, and Erik gasps and Charles squeezes slightly and Erik promptly has what might conceivably be the best orgasm of his life, messy and fully clothed and panting and delirious with the white-hot glorious knowledge of Charles wanting him.  
  
Charles blinks at him wide-eyed, while he’s lying there trying to recapture enough breath to talk. “You—that—I wasn’t even finished! I had a few more sentences!”  
  
“You,” Erik manages weakly, and then just starts laughing, at the indignant expression on Charles’s face; at the way blue eyes dance in return, sharing the euphoria; at the whole amazing world, “you were brilliant, you were perfect, you were—come here, please, come here—” and Charles curls up against him and smiles into his neck.  
  
“Wait,” he says, belatedly realizing a certain fact once he can think again, and shifts around so that they’re face to face. “You didn’t…you, ah…”  
  
“I…don’t think I can. I mean…I want to, I do, but I…” Charles nibbles at his lip. Looks away, then back up, and the courage there nearly shatters Erik’s heart. “I don’t know.”  
  
“Hmm.” He runs his free hand, not the sticky one, through dark hair, temporarily flattening flyaway strands. “You asked me earlier if you could try this…may I try something? With you?”  
  
Charles looks up at him, eyes clear in the moonbeam, trusting. “Yes.”  
  
“It starts with me kissing you.” He runs the hand through all that hair again. Down to the back of Charles’s neck, skin soft under his fingertips. “I would like to kiss you now.”  
  
“Please,” Charles says. “Erik. Sir.”  
  
“Good.” When he leans over, he’s careful—no jostling of that knee, no abrupt movements, no hands going anywhere without plenty of warning—but he’s assertive, too. It seems to fit the moment, and Charles appears to like that; sighs again and opens up for him, eyes fluttering closed, tongue flicking out to chase and taste his, so that’s a good omen, and he nudges gently until they end up among the pillows, Charles sprawled out on his back, Erik half on top of him, gazing possessively down. “You still like me kissing you.”  
  
“Yes…”  
  
“More?”  
  
“Yes _please_.”  
  
“Excellent.” This time he runs a fingertip over that just-kissed mouth, wet and lush and inviting. “May I kiss you—I mean, I’m going to kiss you other places. Unless you tell me to stop. But otherwise…here…” He trails the finger lower. Over the line of that jaw, where there’s just a hint of stubble because Charles hasn’t shaved. “Here.” Along the elegant arch of that throat. Charles is breathing fast, but not, he thinks, from trepidation. And that voice hasn’t told him not to go on.  
  
So he does. “…and here.” A brush over the thin skin of that collarbone, freckles peeking over the loose shirt collar. He doesn’t ask that Charles remove it. Won’t. “Is that something you’d like, Charles? Tell me.”  
  
“Yes…that last one…Erik…” Unsteady inhales, but those hands slide up his arms and wrap around his biceps, and Erik grins fiercely. Yes.   
  
He starts with one more kiss to those lips, nipping at the lower one, teasing it, until he hears the whimper and feels Charles shiver beneath him, and he knows that sound and that motion, so he moves lower, feasting on bared freckles in the moonlight as that head tips back for easier access. Lightly to begin with, then harder, sucking, biting down to hear the gasp, knowing that there will be marks in the morning, red and pink and purple over fair skin.  
  
He pauses to breathe over the newest one, shining wet with possession, “Mine,” and Charles gasps, and his whole body shudders. “Yes—”  
  
“Say it.”  
  
“Yours—yours, Erik, yes, please—”  
  
“You want me to want you, you want me to show you that you’re mine, you want to wake up tomorrow feeling me on your skin—”  
  
“Oh _god_ —”  
  
He spares a glance downward. Charles very definitely wants him. The evidence is plain, stretching against confining cotton, wet and sticky and spreading.   
  
“Can you come like this? From my voice, my hands, on you?” He winds one aforementioned hand into soft waves of hair. Tugs, not hard. “From my mouth?”  
  
“I want—” Charles is panting, eyes closed. “I want to—so close—I can’t—”  
  
“You can.” One more quick, almost chaste, kiss to those lips. “Eyes open. Look at me.”  
  
One blink, then two, then blue eyes find his, looking a little dazed. “Sir…”  
  
“Yes,” Erik tells him, “exactly. This is you, and me. Us, Charles. Together. I love you.”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, practically a gasp, eyes huge and not leaving his, “oh, yes, I love you, Erik, I love you, I—”  
  
“I want you,” he says, and presses one more kiss to the corner of that loose wet mouth, “to come for me, Charles, with me, because I ask you to,” and simultaneously sets a thumb into the newest darkly forming mark over bright freckles, the imprint of his mouth underscored by his hand, and all the muscles go rigid beneath his touch and Erik watches as pulses of wetness spurt out through soaked cotton and leave Charles shuddering, lost in orgasm, collapsing into unthinking bliss.  
  
He kisses that mouth again, softly, licking up all the little pants and moans; puts both arms around shaking shoulders when Charles reaches blindly for him, and lets the night grow warm around them.  
  
“Erik…”  
  
“Oh, you _can_ talk…how was that? For you?”  
  
“That was…” Charles stops to breathe, shakes his head, then looks up. And there’s joy everywhere, trembling out from eyes, lips, hands. “Perfect. That was perfect, Erik, I love you—!”  
  
“Perfect,” Erik agrees, because everything is, Charles and the sex and the glowing moonbeam and the patient bed and their sticky clothing, “yes. Do you want…we should probably change clothes…clean up…tissues, at least…”  
  
“Yes.” But Charles sets a hand on the back of his neck and tugs him down for one more kiss, certain and unhesitating. “We can shower in the morning.”  
  
“We can.”  
  
“Yes. And…you can tell me again about the designs you like. For the front of the house. Nothing too polished, you said.”  
  
“Nothing slippery, in the rain….You _were_ listening.”  
  
“I am,” Charles says, “I want to. If you want to talk to me.”  
  
Erik looks at him, beautiful and flushed and unguarded and truthful and brave. Leans down, until their noses bump together. Promises, “I will,” promises, “I’ll listen to you, whenever you want to say anything to me;” promises, “I’ll always want you,” and Charles whispers back, “I know.”


	19. Charles, And The Complications Of Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they have a visitor, and Charles has a lot of self-doubt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the tardiness! Have been utterly swamped with family things. And this chapter...well, it was the first half of the _next_ chapter up until today, when I gave up and cut the enormous beast in half so as to give you something. On Thursday we get to the massages and orgasms. Promise. In the meantime, enjoy the heartache.
> 
> I am horribly behind on comment-replies and shall try to catch up tomorrow. I love you all. <3
> 
> General warning for slow recovery after non-con and injury. Nothing explicit.

The renovations begin on a Monday. Charles leans on Erik’s arm and watches the façade of his house get stripped away.   
  
Erik’s watching him. He can feel the concern in that gaze, falling over his skin like the sunlight.  
  
They’re standing in the doorway, and he’s got most of his weight on his good leg but is trying not to coddle the knee too much, so has some weight, very cautiously, on that one too. It’s holding him up well enough, so far.  
  
“I was thinking,” Erik offers, “that old greenhouse, around the back…if we take out the glass, and put in more solid walls, I could turn that into a studio. For larger work. Bigger projects…”  
  
“You can do whatever you’d like with my mother’s greenhouse.” The workmen are demolishing the steps. Stone-dust hangs greyly in the air. Charles leans a bit more weight on Erik, and adds, “She never used it, you know. Had it built, and then ignored it completely…would you also like office space? There’re unused rooms all over the third floor.”  
  
“…first floor,” Erik says, after a moment. “If there’s space.”  
  
“It’s the Xavier monstrosity, of course there’s space.” One of the old-fashioned parlors, perhaps. He doesn’t ask why the first floor. He thinks he knows. “Can we—I might want to sit down. For a minute. Kitchen?”  
  
“Of course.” Instantly more apprehensive, those eyes; tension in the mint-leaf forests. Potential harm in sight. “Do you need the Vicodin, or—”  
  
“Charles!”  
  
It’s a shout, from the end of the lane; the person sprinting up to them currently has vivid red hair and knee-high boots and worry laced all through her voice, and she vaults past the workmen and up the tattered remains of one side of the steps and launches herself at him. This maneuver, after a few complicated seconds, resolves itself into Erik holding her decisively at arm’s length while supporting Charles with the other arm, and Charles himself trying to regain balance and shove spiking pain back down through sheer willpower.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“Who are _you_?” she echoes, scowling right back. “And why is my brother white as a sheet and shaking, and if you’re his Erik then you’d better have a good explanation for that, and if not then you’d better have a good explanation anyway—”  
  
“Raven,” Charles interrupts hastily, “this is Erik. Erik, my sister. Raven, I thought—I thought you were working, you couldn’t get time away…”  
  
“Originally, no.” She looks at him, newly-dyed hair sprinkled with construction dust, eyes missing nothing. “But, Charles…”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, continuing a very accurate impression of an angry thundercloud, “you need to sit down.”  
  
“I’m fine!”  
  
“She’s not wrong about how awful you look.”  
  
“Oh, _thank_ _you_ —” At which point he tries to stand up on his own, and his knee promptly folds beneath him, and the next clear moment after all the white-hot pain involves the closest lumpy sofa beneath him and Erik’s terrified eyes inches from his.  
  
“Charles? How bad is it? Can you talk to me, please, can you say something—?”  
  
He sighs, “All right, you win, Vicodin,” and watches the emotions shift in those pale eyes: relief at the talking, fear at the concession, barely-contained desire to call the hospital and get him readmitted…  
  
“Here.” Erik’s taken to carrying the bottle around, proprietarily doling them out. Charles has considered protesting this on numerous occasions, and keeps deciding it’s not worth the fight; right now, he’s grateful. “Oh…you need water…I’ll be right back…don’t move. You’re not allowed to move. Just lie there and—don’t move.”  
  
“Bring back tea!” Charles shouts at him, and then shuts his eyes because his knee is throbbing. The sofa’s trying hard, but it’s ancient and worn and there’s a spring of some kind poking into his back.  
  
Raven’s sitting on the floor to put herself at eye level, and she says, quietly, “Not allowed?”  
  
“I’m…it’s complicated.” He turns his head, looks at her, feeling faintly ridiculous. “He’ll come back with tea, though.”  
  
“Hmm.” She glances around. Faded walls, dusty floors, shrouded windows. “It hasn’t changed much.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“For not having demolished the house? You could have.” A shrug. “But you know that. It’s funny, though, I thought I’d, I don’t know, stand outside and stare at it, have an epiphany about crossing the threshold, something…instead I didn’t even notice. Too busy having a minor heart attack about you passing out at my feet.”  
  
“Still sorry, then.” He pushes himself up on an elbow. “Raven…you don’t have to stay. If you don’t—if you aren’t—”  
  
“Charles,” she says, “you’re an idiot about a lot of things, but you’re still my brother,” and Charles says, “We’re also putting Erik’s studio in the old greenhouse,” and they’re smiling across years of distance at each other when Erik comes in.  
  
“As requested. And the last two scones. You’re supposed to have something in your stomach when you take medication. And I know you didn’t eat much, this morning.”  
  
“I wasn’t hungry,” Charles says, which is true enough. The nightmares had been particularly cruel. Hands, on his skin. Everywhere. And Erik unmoving on the floor.  
  
But Raven glances at the tea-scented mug and grins widely, even more when Erik sits down and helps Charles ease upright and kisses him softly for nibbling at an offered scone.   
  
Outside, the sounds of deconstruction continue, shouts and rumbles and thumps of stone punctuating the morning. But that’s all right; in a week or so, perhaps less given enough financial incentive, there’ll be a new path curving sedately up to the front door, and an elevator installed in place of the old dumbwaiter and a few sacrificed closets, and Erik’s swooping lines of metal will appear out among the grounds, gleaming brightly in molten bronze and iron and steel and gold.  
  
“I’ll stay in a hotel,” Raven says, “just because I don’t want to witness the two of you accidentally forgetting to put pants on in the morning or something,” and smirks at him. Charles looks up at Erik consideringly and inquires, “When was the last time that happened, again? Tuesday, was it?” and Erik breathes in once and out once and pretends to be pondering the question, even though they both know there’s nothing to ponder. They don’t sleep naked anymore.  
  
“Wednesday,” Erik decides finally, “because you made that particular noise, you know, when I did that certain thing with my hand, and then we realized the window was open—”  
  
“Stop!” Raven shrieks, and Charles leans his head on Erik’s solid shoulder and closes his eyes again and wonders whether this is what might be called being all right, and if it can be enough, and then lets himself stop wondering, just for a while, just for now.  
  
Raven comes by for Erik-concocted waffles and bacon in the morning, and offers to drive him to his physical therapy appointment in her rental car. Erik, torn between the instant protest and the equally obvious desire to go shout at the workmen who’ve arrived late and can’t be allowed to get away with slipshod labor, looks plaintively at him.  
  
“You can stay here,” Charles tells him, and takes his hand, squeezing briefly. “We’ll manage.”  
  
Erik turns the hand, loops fingers around his wrist, squeezes back. “Call me if you need anything. Even if you only want to talk. Tell me when you’re on the way home.” Please, goes unspoken. It’ll be the first time they’ve been really apart, not simply downstairs or waiting around the corner in a coffee shop, since that night. Since the breaking of the world.  
  
“I promise,” Charles says, licking syrup out of the corner of his lips, noticing how winter-mint eyes follow the movement. “Sir.”  
  
Erik blinks.  
  
Raven rolls her eyes and puts half a waffle in her mouth and grumbles, around it, “I did not just hear that.”  
  
“Not apologizing.”   
  
“Not listening.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik says.  
  
“I know.” He gets up, wincing at the stiffness. For all the sunshine, it’s a chilly day. “Try not to frighten the contractors too much. They’re working as fast as they can.”  
  
“No promises.” Erik walks him to the car, helps him with the door, hovers with an expression implying he’s about two heartbeats from changing his mind and jumping in the back. “Will you—”  
  
“I’ll be fine.”   
  
“I’ll take care of him.”  
  
“Yes, you _will_.”  
  
“Erik, honestly—”  
  
“I have martial arts training,” Raven says, “and also pepper spray in my purse,” and she and Erik look at each other with mutual understanding.  
  
Charles sighs.  
  
But Erik kisses him through the open car window, hand winding into his hair and tipping his head back, mouth hot and insistent, until he’s forgotten all the exasperation and the impending appointment and is reduced to simply moaning out loud and trying to beg for more, and Erik pulls away, flushed and visibly physically aroused to a point that’s got to be uncomfortable in those tight jeans, and nevertheless far too smug.   
  
“Revenge for this morning. Go to your appointment, Charles.”  
  
“Hardly fair. Mine was only one word.”  
  
“Same effect.”  
  
“Can I remind you both,” Raven observes, “this is a _rental car_ ,” and then nearly runs over Erik’s foot, which may or may not be on purpose, pulling out.  
  
She wants to come in with him, the way that Erik always wants to; Charles shakes his head the way he does at Erik, and tells her he’ll be out in an hour. She looks skeptical, but he’s stubborn—they both are, really, why they’ve tended to get along best at a distance—and he wins because she’s unwilling to push while he’s in pain. He feels a tiny pang of shame at that, but not enough to relent, and she goes off to Erik’s habitual coffeehouse to wait.  
  
His therapist shakes her head at his leg and asks what he’s done to it lately, and he admits to wrenching it the day before, and gets scolded about the importance of taking care of himself. He nods because it’s expected; it’s not as if she’s giving the speech out of anything other than general obligation to a patient. And he glances at his knee, at red scars stretching cruelly over pale flesh, and then away.  
  
He believes that Erik cares. He believes that Raven cares: she’s here, after all. He’s even, slowly, managing to believe that Emma and Moira and everyone else also care. He’s heard the story a dozen times, Erik and the avenging army come to save him. He’s still not quite sure why they would; but he’s always prided himself on being truthful in his own head, and the fact is incontrovertible: they _did_.  
  
But.   
  
It’s that insidious truth-telling voice again, muttering. But, it says. They came for you once. One time, one grand gesture. Over now. Easy, or if not easy, quick.  
  
What he’s asking of them now, and of Erik more than anyone, is neither easy nor quick. He can barely stand. And he can tease Erik and flirt with Erik and use all the right words, because they _are_ words, intangible.  
  
Erik wanted an escort. Later, a partner; Charles believes that too. Their date hadn’t been a lie.   
  
But partner implies equal, and he can’t be, now; he can’t give Erik everything, all of himself, the way he once had. He thinks about sex, about a hand between his legs, a cock sliding into his body, and he feels Sebastian Shaw’s hand on his throat, and he wakes up with his face wet with soundless tears in the night. He can’t, and even if he could, he won’t be flexible enough, won’t be able to kneel with Erik’s hand on his head or wrap his legs around that slim waist in bed…  
  
No, he shouts back at that sly small voice. No. Erik loves me, he’s moving in with me, he kissed me this morning…  
  
This morning. Yes. What about a year from now, snickers his heart, when all the effort, all the love, is wasted, when you can’t give him what he wants in return, when you’ve lost the only thing you were ever really good at?  
  
And he doesn’t have an answer. All he can do is determinedly not listen, and take another step, and one more, across the floor mats, without support. One more. And then again. And maybe if he can keep doing that, over and over, he’ll be less broken. He’s trying; Erik must at least see that. Has to see that.  
  
He collapses at the end of the session, sweat-drenched and shaking; his therapist looks at him with professional concern and mentions that he ought not push himself too hard, too soon.  
  
Charles ignores this. Too hard is relative, anyway. He of all people ought to know.  
  
In the car, Raven gazes at him, eyes dark and anxious. “Is it always this bad?”  
  
“Usually.”  
  
“Charles,” she says. “I know we’ve, um. We don’t talk, not really. But you. When you called me, the time you told me about Erik. You sounded…”  
  
“Naïve?”  
  
“In love.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. “You sounded like you were in love. And, yeah, I’m never going to get why you want some of the things you want, and I still think you could’ve come with me to California, but you stayed. And you did what you said you were going to do, and you helped people. And Erik loves you. So just…y’know, don’t be too hard on yourself, for once?”  
  
Charles opens his mouth, finds to his horror that he’s suddenly close to crying, emotions and exhaustion, and manages, “When did you become so good at this, honestly, you’re the person who used to hide my textbooks so I’d have to read stories for you instead,” and Raven laughs. “I made you read me _The Little Prince_ , what, a hundred times?”  
  
“It certainly felt like it. Since when do you drink tea?”  
  
“I don’t.” She waves at the cup, nestled in the cupholder. “That’s for you.”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, and picks it up, feeling the warmth against his palms. “Oh. Um. So…as your older brother…do I get to ask you…you said you’d met someone…”  
  
“I did,” Raven says, smiling, navigating the car out into traffic with blithe recklessness. “Her name’s Irene.” And by the time they’ve made it back to the mansion, Charles knows all the details about Irene, her dark hair and her laugh and the way Raven’s eyes soften and light up when telling stories of costume-party meetings and theater first dates.  
  
That last one’s the most important. And he’s happy for her.  
  
Happy. It’s a nice feeling. Rather unfamiliar, but nice.  
  
He calls Erik from the road, but the reception’s spotty; it’s therefore no surprise that impatient grey-green-blue eyes are waiting outside the house when they arrive. Charles checks briefly to see whether one foot is tapping. It’s not, but it’s only not, he’s fairly sure, because Erik has an impressive amount of self-control.  
  
He has a brief internal debate, but he is awfully tired and both his legs ache, the good one with the strain of extra weight, all day, every day, and the not-good one for obvious reasons; so he pushes open the car door and waits for Erik to come to him and takes a deep breath and tells himself that it’s okay to ask, and says, “I could use some help getting up, if you’d not mind?”  
  
Erik’s eyes go all wide with startlement, but muscular arms’re already in motion, steadying him as he gets to his feet. “Bad day?”  
  
“Demanding. But…I made it all the way across the room.” And he tries not to despise himself, that that’s something to be proud of.  
  
“That’s good. That’s…fantastic, Charles.” Some of the bitterness might’ve made it into his tone despite his best efforts; Erik’s voice sounds tentative in the praise. Unless that’s simply how Erik feels: obliged to praise him, when there’s nothing fantastic about it at all. “Here, be careful, this section’s uneven…they’re nearly finished on that side, though, what do you think?”  
  
The new design is graceful. Elegant. The walkway glides up the incline with ease, smooth and clearly defined. It’s anxious to make life easier for him; he can see it in the curious stone, the compassionate rounded pavement.  
  
He can’t say what he’s thinking. So he opts for, “Did you stand over them with a whip all day? How on earth did you get this much done?” and ignores the memories that turn up at the choice of word: the sleek black leather coiled in drawers upstairs, the sweet shock of pleasure and pain against his skin, his whispered confession to Erik— _I’ve never liked the metal-tipped ones_ —and Erik’s calm authoritative voice promising, _we’ll throw those away, and keep the others…_  
  
“All I did was stand there and watch their every move.”  
  
“Ah. Not intimidating at all, then.”  
  
“Tomorrow they’ll rip out your dumbwaiter.”  
  
“Sounds thrilling.”  
  
Raven comes around the car, cheerfully tossing keys from hand to hand, and inquires, “Are all the books still in the library, do you think? Because Charles promised to read to me.”  
  
Erik says, “You did?”  
  
Charles says, with feeling, “Very much no,” and ends up doing so anyway after dinner, when Raven reappears with a coating of dust, a triumphant expression, and a familiar book clutched in one hand. Erik listens bemusedly; Raven dozes off halfway through, slumped against his shoulder, and Charles has an odd flashback—himself, years ago, in the same room, Raven at his side, other children listening hesitantly from the hall, sneaking out of their rooms and tiptoeing closer each night. He’d ended up reading to them all.  
  
Erik’s looking at him with such affection that his heart cracks under it. Erik sees him the way they’d seen him: wounded, bruised, head aching from the demands of the day, but still strong, having to be strong. The storyteller. The one who could give them all something they needed, even if only a temporary illusion.  
  
Erik needs him to be all right. Erik needs him to be strong.  
  
Raven stays for a week. It’s a good week, for a given value of good. Erik cooks for them—Erik and Raven, in fact, bond over mocking Charles’s lack of talents in that area, and Charles pretends not to be listening and limps off to set the table—and Raven brings wine and they curl up on the vast expanse of Charles’s bed, all three of them, and watch classic black and white monster movies in the evenings. Charles lets himself drift in and out of sleep, cradled against Erik’s solid chest, and when he opens his eyes more often than not Raven’s glancing back at them from her perch at the foot of the bed, and smiling.  
  
Raven tells them stories about California and the film industry, hilarious ones—Charles positively refuses to believe the one about Robert De Niro in drag, despite her claims to have photographic proof—and Erik traumatizes the contractors into working ahead of schedule, and the nightmares even considerately dwindle to only every two or three days, which is certainly promising.  
  
All of that, in fact, is promising. But.   
  
Again: but.  
  
But he can’t help being afraid, someplace cold and lonely inside his heart. The piece of himself that’s never been prepared to accept the joy of Erik’s arms, the bit that’s always watching, isolated and lurking on the sidelines, is watching now. And it sees how well the days work with three people; sees how much easier it is for Erik to have another person to share the burden, and shines light on dark thoughts about what will happen when Raven goes. When it’s him and Erik and all his inadequacies with no buffer between them.  
  
Neither of them raises the subject of sex. Erik does join him in the shower, but is careful not to look down, to keep eyes on Charles’s, to keep hands above the waist, assisting with shampoo if requested but otherwise extremely solicitous. Gentlemanlike. Restrained.  
  
Charles waits for Erik to say something. He’s made the offer, after all, invited Erik to join him; Erik would indicate interest, wouldn’t he, if the interest were there? But no indications appear, and Charles can’t bring himself to ask. He almost does, the question’s on his lips—do you want me, do you still want me, why won’t you look at me?—but he bites it back unvoiced.   
  
What if the answer’s no? What if Erik had only talked to him, let Charles talk him through orgasm, once, out of pity? What if Erik can only want him that way, hypothetically, and not physically? He knows his knee’s misshapen and twisted; he knows he’ll no doubt flinch at any first touch. Shaw touched him, too. And Erik knows that.  
  
He’s aware he’s being quieter, withdrawing, slipping back into old habits. He spots the glances exchanged across the table when he doesn’t have a preference about movies, or when he answers “what would you like?” when Erik asks him about pancakes versus French toast for breakfast. He can practically hear what they’re thinking.  
  
He doesn’t know what else to do. He wants to be what Erik would like. He wants to see Erik smile again.  
  
Clouds blow in during the night, and construction pauses for the rain. One day. Two. Unfinished and gaping, like missing teeth or broken bones. Charles balances on his good leg, getting dressed, and looks out the window at the disaster of the world, adrift in mud and abandoned tools.  
  
When he puts a hand on the glass, not for support, the surface is cold beneath his fingertips. Silvery and shimmering, like the rain.   
  
There’s a knock, Erik’s, at the door. Considerate, as ever these days.  
  
Charles tugs his sweater over his head, attempts to flatten his hair in the wake, calls back, “Come in!” and Erik ventures into the bedroom, accompanied by the scents of eggs and bacon and his preferred night-black coffee. “Breakfast? I wasn’t sure whether you’d want to stay up here, or try to come down.”  
  
“I can come down.”  
  
“If you’d like.” Erik steps over to his side, joining him at the window. “You could stay here. In bed. I could feed you breakfast in bed…”  
  
“You’d have to bring everything up. And I’m already dressed. I’ll make it down the stairs.”  
  
Erik glances sideways at him. Then out at the rustle of the constant rain. “It ought to stop tomorrow. I checked the weather.”  
  
“I don’t mind it.”  
  
“No,” Erik says, so quietly that Charles isn’t even certain he’s heard the words, “you don’t, do you.”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“Not important. We can’t…they won’t be able to finish, in this. Or start knocking out the glass in the greenhouse. But I can’t start bringing projects over regardless; I’m not leaving you here alone. Do you want help? With the stairs?”  
  
“No. Erik…”  
  
Erik pauses. Those complicated eyes’re torn between resignation and, suddenly, a flicker of excitement. “Charles?”  
  
“When they finish,” Charles says, “I can come with you. To your place. I can…help you move. If you’d want that. I would.”  
  
From Erik’s expression, he thinks that maybe that was the right thing to say. He’s not certain which part of it was right, but some word or combination of words has made Erik’s eyes light up, and he likes that light. He wants to see it again.  
  
He holds Erik’s hand at breakfast. And Erik kisses his fingers, smiling a little, through the billowing splash of the rain.


	20. Charles Gets A Massage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles pushes himself a bit too hard, Erik's very good at leg massages, they say some important words, and make each other feel better. In many ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> General warning for Charles recovering from non-con and injury; nothing explicit. There is, however, Erik and Charles and hands and massage oil, in this one...

Raven leaves on an overcast Monday, under a slate-grey slab of sky. She hugs him fiercely before she goes, and whispers, “Remember what I told you, remember I’m right, okay?” and he smiles but doesn’t laugh and hugs her in return and waves her off.  
  
Erik asks, under the looming sky, whether he’s all right. He nods. Wills it to be true.  
  
He throws himself into the therapy, the exercises. Stretches. Knee bends. Long, and longer, walks. Up and down the stairs. Erik looks concerned, inquires whether he can help, asks how much exercise is advisable. “They told me to practice everything I’d normally do,” Charles says shortly, which is true, though he leaves out the bits about working up to stairs and not doing _everything_ he’d normally do all at once. Erik gazes at him unhappily, eyebrows pulling together, but nods, though Charles spots him hovering around corners and lurking at the bottoms of steps.  
  
They still sleep in each other’s arms. At least he’s got that; at least Erik still wants that. He clings to the thought.  
  
He goes in for his scheduled session at the end of the following week on a sunny morning, clouds racing overhead and buffeted by wind. He can sympathize.  
  
He’s already tired, with a vague dull ache in all his muscles. But he can rest later; he doesn’t have the time to rest, not now.  
  
He needs to be all right. For Erik.  
  
He takes one step across the floor, and his good leg wobbles, and on the next step gives out completely, and then he finds himself lying on the mat and gasping because both legs’ve apparently been skewered with red-hot pokers, and he can’t think anymore.  
  
Through the haze of new agony and old anguish, he’s pretty sure his therapist is yelling at him for his stupidity, in between kneeling down there with him and summoning nurses for assistance. Charles shuts his eyes, and thinks, momentarily, about dissolving through the floor, the ground, the earth; about vanishing, being gone, never being found, never disappointing anyone ever again…  
  
It’s not that bad, they tell him. Overexertion. Stress. No sessions for at least two weeks; no strenuous activity, unless he would especially like to end up in a wheelchair. They don’t say for how long. They just say wheelchair.  
  
They ask whether some helpful person should call Erik. Charles, heart caught somewhere in his throat and shattering, gets out, “No, I’ll—I can call him,” and then sits there on the provided cushion-stuffed chair staring at the blank screen for ten minutes because he’s not sure he in fact can.  
  
The screen provides no useful assistance, so finally he has to make the call. Erik picks up instantly. “Charles? What—are you done early?”  
  
“I’m…yes…” Don’t cry, commands his crumpling heart. Not now. Not on the phone. “Can you come get me?”  
  
“Of course, I’m just around the corner—Charles, please talk to me, what’s wrong?”  
  
“I think…I think I’ve—no, never mind, I can’t—Erik, I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?” Erik sounds out of breath now. As if he’s running. Frantic. “Charles? You are—you’re not hurt—not worse—”  
  
“They said—it might be…if I didn’t…”  
  
“If you didn’t what—” Odd echoes, now; the lobby, perhaps. Charles imagines all the astounded looks, startled glances from passersby, as Erik hurtles past. Erik wouldn’t care, of course. Too focused on his goal.  
  
Focused on him. On reaching him. Again. Always.  
  
That’s true too. And he _knows_ , clutching the hard reality of the mobile phone, that it is.  
  
However many times he’s hurt, or asking for help, Erik will come and will be there. Not out of obligation. Because Erik wants to be there.  
  
For no reason at all, he thinks of a bookshop, and pineapple pizza, and a chessboard, in a park.  
  
The door slams open and all at once Erik _is_ there, right in front of his chair, face pale and drawn. “Charles—”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Charles says, trembling, and Erik says a word that’s very succinct and extremely profane and puts both arms around him. “No. Never. Not for this. Can you tell me what happened?”  
  
“It was my fault…”  
  
“What was—”  
  
His physical therapist comes over. Taps Erik lightly on the arm. Asks for a minute to talk. Erik glares at her, then looks down at Charles, and the expression becomes fonder, though still ferocious. “I can’t leave you.”  
  
“I’m fine.” He isn’t, but he will be. He’s got nothing left to lose, nothing left to give, and Erik came for him anyway, and because there’s nothing left there’s space for that thought.  
  
Erik’s here. And he wants Erik here. He wants something—someone—and he’s allowed that. Even now.  
  
Even broken and potentially crippled as a result of his own stupidity, he’s allowed to feel Erik’s hands on his skin, to see those eyes all fiercely hot and protective on his behalf.  
  
Surprised, he thinks: I’ve just realized I’ve been incredibly stupid. And I do want this. And I can tell him so.  
  
Erik would probably like to hear those words.  
  
His therapist clears her throat, delicately. Red hair falls into her face; she pushes it back. Subtle, but a reminder. She’d asked a question.  
  
He waves a hand, even though he wants to grab onto Erik and never let go. “You can…listen to whatever she needs to say.”  
  
Erik plainly wants to respond, eyebrows doing the worried little motion again; but sighs, in the end. “I’ll be right back.”  
  
From a few feet away, he can’t hear the voices; he knows they’re discussing him, and he can see the line of Erik’s back grow tenser and tighter. None of those muscles like what they’re hearing. And Erik turns to glance at him once; checks himself, turns back.  
  
Charles stares down at the floor, because looking any longer’s too painful. It’s a companionable floor. Plain, world-weary, beyond being stressed about anything much. It just _is_.  
  
He’s envious of hospital linoleum. There genuinely is something wrong with him.  
  
Erik comes back over, feet edging into his field of vision. “Charles?”  
  
He looks up. Erik’s eyes are sad, and wistful, and oddly relieved, all at once. “Do you want to go home?”  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says again. “Don’t. Please. I—I love you.” And then holds out a hand. To him.  
  
Charles stares at it for a second, then stares at Erik’s eyes, then says, “I love you, I’m so sorry, yes, please, take me home,” the words just tumbling out of their own volition, and Erik smiles despite the sadness and some of the hurt dissipates from that gaze.  
  
Erik drives him back to the house and settles him into bed, surrounded by a miniature army of pillows and a mug of tea from the instant kettle that lives in the bedroom these days. Then sits down beside him, and takes his hand, and leans over to kiss him gently on the forehead. “Your doctor—Jean?—she told me you’re not going back in for at least two weeks. Bed rest. Give yourself time to recover.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Charles says again, because he can’t seem to say it enough.  
  
“No.” Erik runs a hand through his hair, and it feels good. Almost like a touch from weeks before. “No, I’m sorry. I told you I’d tell you, every day if you needed that, that you were perfect. And I haven’t been. And you are.”  
  
“I am not.” And then he has to laugh, because it’s such a ridiculous argument to be having.  
  
“You’re perfect for me.” The hand strokes his hair again. “I have an idea. Will you let me try it?”  
  
“You’ve not told me what yet. But…probably. Erik, I—”  
  
“I know.” A kiss to the top of his head this time, full of certainty. “She said you’d be…hurting. Sore. And I asked…I thought massages might help. I—”  
  
“You…want to give me a massage?”  
  
“I would like that, yes.” Erik’s eyes are very earnest. That rare and beautiful color, a shade Charles has never seen anywhere else, is determined, and full of hope. “I have strong hands. And you need—I think we both need me to touch you. To…take care of you, for a while. Would you let me try?”  
  
The wind murmurs and purrs, around the walls.  
  
Inside those walls, with a sensation running through his bones like the shock of jumping from a plane, holding his breath for the parachute to unfurl, Charles says, “Yes.”  
  
And Erik’s expression cracks open even wider than it had in the hospital, raw and vulnerable and profoundly thankful, and Charles says, surprised, “Oh,” because he’s figured it out, that odd earlier relief. “You…you were afraid this would happen. That I would…hurt myself.”  
  
“That you would—” Erik laughs, not out of amusement; drops his face into his hands, offers, through fingers, “I’ve been so fucking scared. That you would hurt yourself. Yes.”  
  
There’s a pause, then. It’s a busy sort of pause. Full of unsaid words. The wind yelps and grumbles in the distance. The pillows are soft behind his back. And Erik’s weight makes a dip on the bed beside him, solid and present.  
  
“Well,” Charles tells him, because it’s true, because he’s surprised by that too, because he suspects they need these particular words to be said aloud, “if it’ll make this…better…I didn’t. Didn’t think about it, I mean. Not—that way.”  
  
“You didn’t.”  
  
“No, I didn’t. I was—I was stupid and I was afraid and I was pushing myself too hard because I didn’t want to lose you. But that, all of that…that was because I wanted to be here. With you.”  
  
And Erik looks up and reaches out and grabs his hands and kisses them, and Charles laughs because Erik hasn’t shaved in a few days and the hint of auburn scruffiness tickles, and Erik informs his fingers, muffled, “I love you.”  
  
“And I love you.” The parachute’s working, now. Catching him after the leap; catching them both. A safe landing. He can even picture it. “Did you…do you want to…try now?”  
  
“If you want me to. Do you? Want me to?”  
  
“Yes.” He hesitates, and then adds, very quickly, “where do you want me?” and Erik’s eyes tentatively dance. “I think…lie down? In the middle of the bed? I’m mostly planning to work on your legs; you can stay on your back, if you want…”  
  
“I…think I’d like that. Seeing you…” He wiggles lower on the bed. Erik watches him. “Here?”  
  
“That should work.” When Erik shifts position, graceful and powerful as ever, Charles finds himself studying each flex of muscle, each bunch and elongation. Erik’s easing the good leg into his lap, and those long-fingered hands are very warm, and Charles gazes at that bent head and feels warm all over too.  
  
Erik wants him. Has seen the ugliest bits of him, and is here in his bed. Offering him a massage.  
  
Erik hasn’t seen the physical ugliness. Not yet. Not lately.  
  
Erik’s evidently entirely prepared to leave all of Charles’s clothing on, and make the attempt that way. However is most comfortable. No pressure. No demands.  
  
“Erik?”.  
  
The fingers pause.  
  
“If you want…if you wanted…this will be easier if I…oh, hell. Could you just…stand up—don’t go anywhere—and turn around? Don’t look at me for a second?”  
  
“Are you—”  
  
“I’m all right. I only…want to try something, also. Please?”  
  
“You want to…if you say so. If you’re asking. Not for too long?”  
  
“No, this shouldn’t take long.” He waits, pulse thumping, for Erik to move. And then, before he can talk himself out of it, sits up and tugs his shirt off. Over his head, and away. For good measure, tossed across the room.  
  
Erik stirs, most likely because he’s narrowly missed being pelted by fabric. “Can I—”  
  
“No!”  
  
One more. The more difficult of the two. He looks at his hands. They don’t shake, and they aren’t even bruised, not any longer. They’re just his hands.  
  
He puts them on his hips. He’s still wearing loose-fitting workout pants, the ones he’d worn to the aborted therapy session. They wait, pointedly, for him to get on with it.  
  
There’re some logistics to work out. Leverage. One hip at a time. But once they’re down to his thighs he can manage, and he does, inching fabric gingerly over his knee.  
  
Which…  
  
…looks better than he recalls. Scarred, yes, and not the same shape as the matching one. But the scars’re fading, pink not red, and it looks like a knee, and not a lump of twisted flesh.  
  
Out of curiosity, he brushes a finger over it. Certainly feels like his leg. Tender and sore, but that’s in part from the overexertion. And he’s sitting here nearly naked, only boxers left, on his bed and running a hand over his leg, and the wind chuckles to itself beyond the window and Erik’s making impatient little growling sounds, and Charles falls back on the bed and starts laughing quietly at the ceiling, at the wind, at the whole bloody imperfect glorious world.  
  
He’s so damn lucky, really. He’s here with Erik. They’re both here.  
  
“Erik,” he says.  
  
“Can I turn around? Please?” That voice is somewhat hoarse. Practically begging.  
  
“You can…go open the third drawer in the dresser. No, third on the left. Pick something you’d like.”  
  
“Charles…these…are scented oils. These…”  
  
“Only work on bare skin?” He grins conspiratorially at the ceiling, lying sprawled over his bed, pants left in a happy puddle on the floor. “I know. You can turn around now.”  
  
“Oh, I can—” And then Erik does turn. And stops.  
  
One bottle of massage oil, fortunately plastic, actually hits the carpet. Bounces.  
  
“Charles…you…”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“You’re…”  
  
“I’m not quite naked,” Charles says, and can’t help flushing as he says it, “I’m sorry, I can’t—I couldn’t—I don’t know. Yet. But I thought…this is you. And I would like to…I do trust you. Is this all right?”  
  
“Is this—of course it is, for me…are you sure?”  
  
“Very sure. Come here and touch me.”  
  
“I…”  
  
“You, yes. Please?”  
  
“You,” Erik says, shaking his head, but his gaze is wondering, admiring, soft. “You’re beautiful. I—Charles, I—”  
  
“Don’t. Just…don’t make it…don’t talk about it. Too much. Or I won’t be able to. All right?”  
  
“…all right. Yes.” Erik’s gaze goes back to the open drawer, flits over to Charles’s body as if it can’t stay away, then back to the drawer. “I didn’t know we had so many options. Are you smiling?”  
  
“Yes.” We. He likes the way that sounds. “And that’s because you always just grab the first one in the drawer. Did you pick something?”  
  
“I…get impatient, around you. I thought you might like this one. Vanilla and sandalwood…I thought it sounded warm.”  
  
They’ve never used that one for sex. Right now, that’s potentially encouraging. No associations. Only what they make of it here and now. The combination does sound relaxing, so he says so.  
  
Erik smiles, at that. Comes back to the bed, sits down cross-legged, bottle in one hand. “Can we try?”  
  
“I think so, yes…”  
  
The first touch is very gentle. Erik starts with his good leg, checking for any change in Charles’s expression when nestling it into his lap, taking time to warm oil between large palms, methodical and purpose-driven. The sunlight splashes in through the window, curious and companionable. The day’s still young, barely half over. They’ve got all afternoon.  
  
Erik’s hands move deliberately, a bit more assertive as no objections arise. They knead stiff muscle, working bit by bit, unhurried. Erik’s good at this, Charles realizes dreamily. Artist’s hands, strong and focused. He can feel himself relaxing, drowsy and pliant under Erik’s touch.  
  
Fingers find one stubborn knot of tension, and he gasps; they hesitate. “Too hard?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Almost, though? Tell me if I hurt you.”  
  
“You won’t.” The scents of vanilla and sandalwood hang in the air. He feels heavy with it, oddly calm; soothed, perhaps, seduced into contentment. Erik finishes with his calf, moves upward, slow deep punctuation around his functional knee, the line of his thigh.  
  
“You have more muscle, here. More…defined.”  
  
“Are you surprised? I’ve been walking on it.” Two ways that statement could go; he means the better one, though, and sees the answering smile.  
  
“You’ll be able to outrun me, soon.”  
  
“I’d not want to.”  
  
The air hums with sensation at that admission, lazily erotic, not urgent but languid and sensual as the whispers of sugar and rich wood, the lull before the storm. Erik’s hands run along his thigh, not kneading now, only rubbing his skin as if they’ve forgotten how to be still. Outside, with flawless timing, the wind falls silent.  
  
He turns his head, and their eyes meet.  
  
When Erik slides one of those hands higher, touching the last remaining scrap of fabric, eyes questioning, Charles nods.  
  
They kiss slowly, exploring, mostly naked; Erik’s lost his shirt somewhere, but keeps his jeans on, denim rough and welcoming against bare skin. Erik tastes of black coffee and heat and desire, that indefinable last ingredient that’s Erik himself, suffusing all of his senses. The world’s drenched in sweetness, scent and taste and soft little sounds. Breathless gold in the midday light.  
  
Erik murmurs his name, sounding drunk with it, hand sliding over his chest and slick from the oil. Charles sighs and arches into the touch because it feels good; Erik groans back, an echo, and presses lips to his throat. He shifts his hips, unthinking, seeking the rasp of fabric, that lean body atop his; the pain stirs, but it’s distant, not unimportant but unheeded right now. Erik’s hand wanders lower, finding the curve of his hip, possessive, and he feels the line of Erik’s erection against his thigh, rigid and hot and insistent.  
  
His own cock stirs at the thought, excited. Erik wants him. That’s Erik’s hand sliding between them, ready to touch him—  
  
—and stopping. Erik’s sitting up. “Charles?”  
  
“You—I—did I do something wrong?” He can feel the blunt sting of his teeth, when he bites his lip. It’s that or scream. “Did you—do you not want to?”  
  
“No—oh, god, no, I didn’t mean it like that, I do want to, I want you—stop that, please, you’ll make yourself bleed—” One finger rests on his lower lip, gently. Charles stops trying to chew it to shreds. Difficult with a finger in the way, in any case. “Please. I only wanted to ask—you aren’t saying no. And I need you to tell me that you want this. You’re doing this because you want to. Not because you’re trying to—to please me, or—make me want you. You don’t need to. I already do.”  
  
“…I know,” Charles says after a second. “And I do. Want you. I want to do this with you.”  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Yes…then…would you let me—no, not only let me, would you want me to—touch you? Here?” That hand hovers over his erection, which has lessened but not gone away, and he feels the rush of heat at the thought.  
  
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, Erik, please, I want to, I want you, please touch me,” and Erik grins, showing all those teeth. “Yes. I do enjoy you saying that.”  
  
 _“Please—”_  
  
“You have a beautiful cock, Charles. So thick, and hard, and so desperate for me…should I ask you to beg?” A finger traces over his tip, drawing moisture out of the slit, and he gasps. “The rest of you is beautiful as well. All of you. So perfect, and all mine…”  
  
“Not—oh _god!—_ not perfect…do that again, Erik, god…”  
  
“Definitely perfect.” Erik sits up to look at him, not stopping the motion. “Is this what you wanted? Me touching you?”  
  
“Yes—” But even as he says it, he feels the world lurch, dizzyingly abrupt.  
  
Erik’s watching him. Touching him, his cock sliding through the circle of long fingers, flushed and dripping. Erik’s asking him to beg for it, and watching him, making him come, and Shaw had watched him and touched him and forced him to orgasm—  
  
“Charles,” Erik’s murmuring, “will you come for me?” and for a vertiginous second all the memories collide, Erik’s hand and Shaw’s smile and another voice saying, “Ah, there you are,” and Erik whispering “come,” skin making slick wet sounds over skin, and he can’t breathe—  
  
He feels the reaction as if he’s outside his body, jerking away. He nearly knocks himself off the bed. And the red blackness closes in.  
  
“Charles!”  
  
He can’t breathe. No air left in his lungs. In the world.  
  
“Charles, look at me!” Erik’s voice. Terrified. He wonders distantly what Erik’s seeing, to provoke that kind of fear. “Charles, please, it’s only me, no one else, I won’t hurt you, I won’t touch you if you need that—but open your eyes, look at me, please!”  
  
He tries. His eyelids’re being disobedient. Unkind of them. Erik’s swearing in multiple languages, English and German and French and a few he doesn’t recognize.  
  
Little sparkles swim behind his eyes. How long has it been since he’s managed to inhale?  
  
“No, no, Charles, you’re not leaving me, not now, _no_ —” Erik’s hands dig into his shoulders. Pull him upright. “Breathe, Charles, that’s an order, can you hear me?”  
  
Yes. He can. And Erik sounds so scared.  
  
He gulps in air. The rush of it fills his lungs, cool and intoxicating.  
  
“Good. Do it again. Slower. God—” That voice cuts off briefly; when it comes back, it sounds as if it’s been crying. “Thank you. Charles, I—thank you.”  
  
He shakes his head, and the hands tighten on his shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t’ve pushed you. I love you, Charles, I’m sorry. I don’t know—what do you want me to do? Anything. I promise you.”  
  
He breathes out. Opens his eyes. “Erik…”  
  
“I’m here.” There’s dampness in those eyes. Spilling over. “I love you. I’m sorry, Charles, I know it was my fault. I frightened you. I never meant—”  
  
“I know.” He lifts a hand, finds Erik’s chest. Imagines that he can sense that heartbeat, pounding wildly, all the way up his fingers, through his body, shared. “I know you didn’t mean to. It wasn’t you.”  
  
“But it was.” Erik tugs him closer, tentatively folding arms around him. Charles likes that position, being wrapped up in Erik’s love. It’s a safe sort of location. Secure. “I’m so sorry. I thought—I should’ve known better. Are you…not all right, but…”  
  
“I love you.” It’s important. He’s still awfully hollow and off-balance, everything precarious inside, but those words matter. “It wasn’t you, I promise. And I wanted to. I only—I don’t think I can—but it’s not your fault. It’s me. I’m sorry.”  
  
“Don’t say that.”  
  
“I have to. I can’t—what if I never can, what if you—you’ll want more, you deserve more, you should—you shouldn’t have to settle for this, for me, I can’t give you this—”  
  
“I don’t care. I’ll love you anyway. I’ll be here. It doesn’t matter, Charles.” Erik’s hands are large and steady on his back, not moving much and clumsy with sincerity, with the awareness of all that broken space where they can’t go. “Do you—can you believe that? Please?”  
  
“You can’t,” Charles tells him, equally clumsy, “you can’t say that. Don’t say it doesn’t matter. It does. You’ll—if we’ve lost this and it won’t be the same and what if it’s never the same, don’t tell me you don’t care, because then you _don’t care_ —”  
  
He’s crying now. Not graceful elegant tears. Huge broken painful sobs that hurt his chest. He manages to take a shuddering breath, and then another one, and to push out, “Please.”  
  
“Oh, Charles…” Erik swallows. Hard. Starts to speak, stops. Sits up, turns him gently so that he’s sitting up too, with support, and reaches out a hand. “May I?”  
  
He nods; Erik’s fingertips rub over his cheeks, softly, swiping wetness away. “You’re right.”  
  
“I…am?”  
  
“You are. Not if you think I’m going to leave you—I’m not—but it does matter. It’s not fair to you to say it doesn’t. But not for the reasons you think.” One hand cups his cheek, only one, as if afraid to pen him in. Charles blinks; feels one last solitary diamond drop slide through his eyelashes. Erik’s finger catches that one too.  
  
“It matters because it’s such a part of who you are. So lovely, and so open, giving yourself to me, all of you, so freely…” Erik pauses to swallow again, motion that might be holding back sorrow, or pain, or heartbreak. But he doesn’t let go, and that gaze doesn’t flicker. Charles finds himself breathless, despite the occasional post-tear hiccup, looking back.  
  
“I hate the idea that you might…that you might think of yourself as being…any less, now. And, yes, I’ll miss that, if we can’t have it again. But I don’t need it. Not the way I need you. You, Charles, not the sex with you. So I’ll be here, and I will love you, no matter what happens. Understand?”  
  
“…yes. I think so. Yes. And…Erik…”  
  
“Really? I mean…yes?”  
  
“Really yes, I think. And…I like this. Right now, with you.”  
  
“You mean that.”  
  
“You asked me once to be honest. To tell you how I was feeling.”  
  
“And…you are. You like me holding you.”  
  
“I feel,” Charles says, with the weight of that hand unwavering where it’s cradling his face, with his eyes not leaving Erik’s, “loved. With you.”  
  
“You—” Erik tries to finish the sentence, gives up, shakes his head, and the kiss he presses to the corner of Charles’s mouth tastes of salt-spray and water. “You are. I love you. Always, Charles. I told you that you were mine, and you said yes to me, and so I’m never giving you up. Or giving up on you. Can you believe that?”  
  
Charles whispers, “Yes,” and for a while they don’t speak, only holding each other in the hush, letting the yes spread out through the room and the house and the sun-and-shadows sky beyond the window, making a sanctuary out of the day.  
  
When he turns his head, he can kiss Erik’s shoulder, and taste warm smooth tanned skin against his lips. Erik makes a helpless small sound, and holds him tighter.  
  
After a while, he breathes again, “I love you,” and likes the way that heartbeat picks up under his ear at the words.  
  
“And I love you. Can I do anything?” Erik’s kissing him gently, earlobe, cheekbone, eyebrow. “Get you anything?”  
  
“Mmm.” He closes his eyes, feeling the sweetness seep into his bones. Unthinking, he shifts a cramping leg; winces at the spear-point stab. Erik winces, too.  
  
“Can I…we never got to your other leg. May I try again? To help?”  
  
“You’re asking my permission? Sir.”  
  
“Oh,” Erik says, sounding faintly amused, a touch apprehensive, and a lot delighted, “I think…I’m telling you to tell me what you’d like. I want to know. All right?”  
  
“I think so, yes. I would…I’d like your hands on me. But…”  
  
“But?”  
  
A glance at his knee’s enough; Erik gets it instantly, from the flash of incendiary protectiveness that crosses those eyes. But all he says is, “Lie down, please, _kätzchen_ , and keep looking at me.”  
  
“You’re calling me your kitten in German now?”  
  
Eyebrows fly up, startled, entertained. “You speak German?”  
  
“Not really. A few obscenities. Pet names. Things I’ve…picked up. I don’t mind, but why kittens? Is it something about me that makes people think of tiny cats? Is it the hair?”  
  
“Perhaps.” Erik sets a hand on his foot. Smiles a little. “I was just thinking about you in the sunlight. And the way you enjoy being petted. I like you this way.”  
  
“Mocking your pet names for me?”  
  
“Being happy.” Thumbs knead his instep, firm and reassuring. Charles wiggles his toes in Erik’s lap, just because he can. “May I go higher? Your leg?”  
  
“Yes, sir.” He watches, head propped up on an arm, as those skillful hands make their way up his calf, working away the cramps and soreness and coldness of fear. “I love your hands. I don’t think I’ve told you that, but I do.”  
  
“You do?” Erik pauses to study his own hands, broad palms, long fingers, old nicks and scars from recalcitrant metal and leaping flame. “They’re only my hands.”  
  
“They’re yours. They feel like you.” The walls creak once, suddenly, old house shaking its bones back at the chattering breeze. Charles doesn’t flinch; Erik smiles again, and gets back to the task in progress. “Is this helping?”  
  
“Yes. I can tell.” True. Everyplace those hands discover is left malleable and yielding and content, and scented vaguely with exotic vanilla. Erik pauses again, takes a breath, and Charles realizes that he’s finished the calf and is gazing at the scars, lines tight at the corners of pale eyes.  
  
“I’m all right,” he says, because he is. Probably he ought to be ashamed or afraid or embarrassed, but this is Erik and the world’s soft and tinted with gilt-hued light around them, golden afternoon and royal blue sheets and tall dark wood bedposts, a secret treasure-house just for them. He can’t be ashamed of anything, with Erik’s hands continuing to rest on his skin.  
  
“Charles…” Erik’s voice shakes ever so slightly. “You’re incredible.”  
  
“Is this still about me mocking your pet names?”  
  
“No.” Erik lifts a hand, lets it hover over the longest of the scars, reconstruction under his skin. “Will it hurt? If I touch you?”  
  
“Not as much now.” He puts out a hand as well. Captures Erik’s fingers. Guides them lower, until they make contact, brushing over fading pink lines. “See? Safe. There’s even metal in there, now. You might like that.”  
  
“Safe,” Erik murmurs, and then leans forward and kisses him, just once, a breath of very gentle air over uneven patches.  
  
“Oh,” Charles says, and then starts crying, very quietly.  
  
“Did that—”  
  
“No, you didn’t hurt me, that was—I love you, Erik, I—please come here and kiss me, I—” Out of words, he just tangles a hand in Erik’s hair and pulls him close, so their lips meet, all astonished heart-piercing joy.  
  
“Charles,” Erik breathes into the kiss, and he moans what’s meant to be Erik’s name but ends up being no word at all because Erik’s tongue is relentlessly plundering his mouth, kindly but determinedly reasserting that claim, and Charles shivers and moans again and opens up for the claiming. He’s Erik’s, all of him, every single wounded and scarred and still-here inch. And he _wants_ to be.  
  
Hands, slippery with oil, find his waist, his hips, the old smooth burn-marks, mementos of the person he’d been. He doesn’t pull away, and Erik only growls some indistinct word and yanks him closer, lips traveling down his throat, to the sensitive spot just above his shoulder, teeth grazing over the pulse-point in his neck and making him gasp and shudder.  
  
“Erik,” he manages, panting, “Erik—” and Erik stops kissing his throat with what appears to be herculean effort, arousal and bewildered desire and abrupt concern battling in those eyes. “Charles? Is this—are you asking me to stop? I can stop…”  
  
“No,” Charles tells him cheerfully, and all at once he wants to laugh, giddy exultation bubbling up like champagne through his veins, every atom alive and dancing, “no, or yes, but only for a moment, please, because you told me to tell you what I’d like, and I’d quite like you to be naked. Sir.”  
  
The expression on Erik’s face, then, is utterly priceless. Charles will remember it forever.  
  
“You—you want—you said naked—you said _me_ —”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Are you…sure?”  
  
“Would you like me to help?”  
  
“I…you just said…Charles, you said you weren’t certain you could…”  
  
“I don’t know,” Charles admits, “about sex. Yet. But I’d like to see you. Because…you’re you. You’re not him. And you kissed me. You didn’t answer me; would you like me to remove your clothing now?”  
  
“Oh god,” Erik says.  
  
“I’ll take it as a compliment, but that’s still not a yes or a no.”  
  
“You…” Erik looks at him, really looks at him. Up and down. Reassuring himself, in every possible way, that Charles means the words. And then, slowly, anticipatorily, begins to grin. “Yes, then. I think I would. Come here, _kätzchen_. Remove my clothing.”  
  
“Kittens don’t have opposable thumbs, sir,” Charles sighs, and flicks open the button of Erik’s jeans. Leaves a kiss in the wake of it, over the exposed tempting skin, the trail of happy hair. Erik’s hand settles on his head, trembling with laughter.  
  
“Did I say you could be sarcastic, Charles? Is this going to happen every time I try to think of a pet name for you?”  
  
“Only the ridiculous ones. And you enjoy me being sarcastic, sir.” He tugs the zipper down, takes a breath, observes, “You’ll have to move if you want me to get these off,” and Erik concurs, “Yes, absolutely I do, I love you,” and obligingly twists his hips so that Charles can wrestle jeans and briefs out of the way.  
  
There’s a moment in which they both stop and consider the sight. Erik starts to speak; Charles tips his head to one side and murmurs, “I did miss you,” and reaches out and fits a hand around that inviting length, and Erik’s sentence turns into a gasp.  
  
“You always make my hands look small,” Charles tells him, “doing this,” and strokes him once, feeling the jump and twitch, the iron-silk sensation of it. Erik, under his hand.  
  
“God—” Erik’s eyes are dark, hot and wild. “Charles, I—may I touch you, please, please, I want—”  
  
“That’s my line, isn’t it?” His own cock throbs between his legs, blood thumping, needy. This _is_ Erik, and he remembers what that feels like, too. Doing this with Erik.  
  
The other memories exist. They might never fade completely. But this is here and now, and he’s in love and loved, and the universe is bright with it. Bright, and sparkling, and scented with massage-oil sweetness.  
  
Erik’s gazing at him, eyes asking, but not moving to touch, not unless it’s okay. “Yes,” Charles says, and slides down onto the bed, onto his back, where there’s the least strain on his leg, not that he’s noticing any at the moment. “Yes, you can.”  
  
Erik groans his name and practically pounces on him, one long leg hooking over his good one, fitting their bodies together; a hand slips between them and closes on his cock and strokes and this time Charles is the one who gasps, because Erik’s been busy with the oil when he wasn’t paying attention and the glide feels so good, wetness and heat and pressure, just the right shade of too rough and exactly the way he likes it; Erik’s cock’s rubbing along his hip and Erik’s mouth is on his shoulder again, sucking a bruise into his skin, and he can hear himself making little moaning noises, breathless and pleading, Erik’s name and please and yes…  
  
“Charles,” Erik whispers, voice sweeping over the new mark, dark and inundated with desire, and he whimpers and pushes up into the hand, large thumb coaxing wetness out of the slit. “Erik—sir— _please_ —”  
  
“Shh. Don’t move, Charles, you’re not allowed to move too much, be still, be good, you can do that for me…”  
  
“I can—” Erik’s other hand is teasing his nipple, pinching, playing, making him sob with need. “I can, I’ll be good for you, Erik, please—”  
  
“Can you? Can you wait, if I ask you to wait? Or come, if I tell you to come, like this?” There’s a shift in weight, against him; Erik grabs his hand, and his fingers wrap around both their cocks, aligned and rubbing together. The friction’s unbearably exquisite, and Erik leaves that larger hand atop Charles’s own, controlling the pace, the rhythm, the tightness. “Eyes open. Look at me.”  
  
He’d not even realized he’d closed them. When he looks, Erik’s looking back, and Charles wants to fall into the love and support and desire there forever, and be caught.  
  
“If you could see yourself,” Erik whispers. “Charles.”  
  
“Please.” He _is_ begging, now, as the hand strokes over a particularly sensitive spot, shocks of pleasure flying all the way down his spine. He can’t find any other words. “Yours, all yours, I love you—”  
  
And Erik breathes in sharply and tightens that grip and demands, “Mine, Charles, yes, come for me, now,” and he does, whole body shuddering deliciously with release, waves of heat that wash from his spine to his toes through his cock, spurting over their joined hands. Erik groans, and goes tense against him, and there’s another flood of wet stickiness between their bodies. And then there’s quiet.  
  
Some incalculable time later, Erik lifts his head, blinking dazedly, worn out and satisfied and worried. “Charles?”  
  
“Mmm.”  
  
“You…are you…was that…”  
  
“I feel…what was your word? Incredible? That’s how I feel.” Erik kisses him for that, over the spot where he suspects the darkest mark is beginning to show, vivid souvenirs of what they’ve just accomplished. “I love you.”  
  
“And I love you.” Erik pushes himself upright. “I should…clean you up?”  
  
“Is that a question?”  
  
“I should clean you up. You can’t be comfortable…”  
  
“I am,” Charles agrees, as the wind bursts into noisy life again, racing merrily around thick old walls, “and yes, in a moment, but could you…”  
  
“Anything. What?”  
  
“Kiss me?”  
  
“Always.” One long finger taps at the bridge of his nose, most likely seeking out and connecting freckles in the sunshine, after. “Better?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says, lying there with the lean warmth of Erik’s body pressed against his, the mess of mingled climaxes and sweat and oil drying tacky on his skin, an exhaustion that has nothing to do with pain and doubt and fear but is instead pure and joyous and beautiful sinking into his bones, “yes. We are.”


	21. Erik Has An Excellent Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they sleep naked and wake up together and think about the future. Also, sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So much love and appreciation for all the comments and kudos and everything! Seriously, you guys, I'm sort of overwhelmed. Thank you, so very very much. Two chapters (well, one and Emma's epilogue) to go...
> 
> General warnings for recovery, a few chapters after the actual event by now, from non-con and injury.
> 
> The next chapter may have to be Monday and not Thursday. I know, I know, but it's near the end of summer classes and I've got a lot to do these next two weeks, job-wise, plus some apartment-related trauma involving toilets breaking that must be dealt with. Life, you know. *sigh* We'll see. If not Thursday, definitely Monday. :-)

Erik wakes up to sunlight streaming across the room, carefree and unfettered, and the memory of vanilla and sandalwood in the air, and Charles curled naked into his arms.  
  
His first thought isn’t a thought at all, only an unformed and profound sense of rightness. Himself, and Charles, in the plush blue silk bed, at home. The world the way it always ought to be.  
  
His second thought isn’t a thought either. It’s complete horror. Charles is here, yes. In bed with him. Naked. Charles offered to have sex with him, and it had been sex, hands and bodies and that luxurious voice calling him sir, and he’d said yes even after that first panic attack, he’d known how badly hurt Charles was, why had he said yes when he knew better, when he’s known since that very first night that Charles isn’t good at saying no…  
  
His third thought jumps on the other two with the force of reality, and says: look at him.  
  
He does.  
  
Charles is sleeping. Peacefully, calmly, undisturbed. Has been sleeping all night, or at least Erik doesn’t recall ever being shaken into stomach-lurching fear by tiny nightmare cries. Charles, in fact, has faint pink lines on his cheek from the pillow and messy hair falling into one eye and toes stuck beneath Erik’s left ankle as if content with the anchorage, in dreams.  
  
Oh, he thinks. Oh. And his heart almost breaks with it. Raw infinite joy.  
  
He’d gotten them both up and into the bath, after that astonishing and spectacular afternoon, the day before; he’d been in a lingering state of post-orgasmic euphoria and amazement and exhaustion, and all he’d really wanted to do had been to stare at Charles forever and say “I love you,” and possibly also sculpt him in bronze if those blue eyes would permit the attempt, homage to all the strength and the pain and the beauty and the capacity for faith in at least one other person, in Erik, even now. But Charles was half-asleep and sticky from their exertions and had been ordered to remain in bed for two weeks. Charles needed him.  
  
So he’d drawn a bath and put an arm around those neatly muscled shoulders and another one cautiously under those legs, so adorably long for a person otherwise decidedly pixie-sized, and waited for the rueful little smile and nod. And then had proceeded to lavish care on every sparkling freckle, while Charles blushed ferociously and didn’t protest.  
  
He’d tucked Charles back into bed—“I heard your doctors! They were explicit!”—and made tea and ensured that the Vicodin sat within arm’s reach; Charles had glanced at it, then up at him, and nodded, but didn’t reach for one, and Erik believed him.  
  
He lies there, one arm serving as his pillow because he’d fallen asleep propped up on it watching dark eyelashes rest over soft skin, and lets the morning unfold like a rose around them.  
  
They’d spent the remains of the afternoon figuring out the logistics of moving all his sculptures-in-progress out of the old studio and not merely across town but beyond it, out in the world of estates and old money where they were currently sleeping. Not a world Erik had ever dreamed of. Not a place he’d’ve been able to comprehend, once upon a time. Not the anger-powered radical he’d been. Art as rage against injustice and the chip on his shoulder. Unwillingness to see good in anyone who’d grown up taking advantages for granted. And the fleeting viciously triumphant thought, sending his request to Frost Services, that he could flaunt the highest-priced escort artistic success could provide, to be worn on his arm like a trophy.  
  
Charles’s inheritance has paid for Hank McCoy’s clinic. For hospital bills for Emma Frost’s escorts. Is paying now for his own medical expenses. And Charles still feels that it’s not doing enough; likely always will.  
  
Charles is wrong about that, of course. Erik will say so as many times as necessary, because he knows that he was wrong as well. Charles is the bravest person he’s ever known. Not perfect or flawless or without scars. But that doesn’t make the statement less true. The opposite, in fact.  
  
Charles makes him, if not a magically instantaneously better man, a man who wants to be so. A man who can be what Charles needs. And that’s not about anger or trophies or triumph. That’s about strong safe arms in the night, and tea with extra sugar in the morning, and kisses even after blue eyes request pineapple and jalapeño peppers on pizza.  
  
That’s a kind of art, as well. Charles had known that long before he had. And if the blue eyes’re too badly frightened at times to see that through the flashbacks and clouds of fear, that’s all right. Erik’s figured it out too, at last, after all. So he can remember for the both of them, until those clouds go away.  
  
It _is_ a sunny morning. No haze in sight. Convenient, that. The universe, on their side.  
  
Yesterday, he’d run downstairs to make food once the sky began darkening, night closing in; had come back with his best effort at his mother’s matzah ball soup plus ginger ale because that was what had been in the refrigerator on the day he’d arrived for their first date. Charles had looked up from the Heinlein novel of the moment, eyes bright and warm. Had murmured, “you’ll have to show me how to make this, someday,” and Erik hadn’t been able to reply immediately, struck breathless by the image of himself and Charles side by side in the kitchen, working out his mother’s recipes through half-remembered instructions and laughter and trial and error…  
  
Charles might not be able to stand upright in a kitchen for too long, but that wouldn’t present a major difficulty. Precisely what bar stools were designed for, and the ones in the kitchen won’t mind. They’ll probably be pleased to support Charles if needed. And if not, he can turn them into kindling and buy friendlier seats, or at least more easily intimidated ones.  
  
He’d said, belatedly, “…yes!” And seen the answering affirmation, more giddy than the silver stars, in those glorious eyes.  
  
When he breathes, the late-morning air tastes of sunlight, and vanilla, and freckled skin.  
  
That last one’s potentially his imagination; or, from the way the sunbeams’re appreciatively caressing Charles’s uncovered back, perhaps not. He can’t really blame the sunbeams, since Charles sleeping is irresistible. Like, yes, a fluffy-haired tiny blue-eyed kitten, he thinks, and grins, fiercely happy.  
  
He’ll have to use that pet name again. As many times as possible, to elicit that cheerfully sarcastic reaction, Charles being so thoroughly himself, the self that peeks out in rare glimpses through cheeky innuendo and shyly proud chessboard genius and unapologetic hand-holding in a park. Looking up through long eyelashes and removing Erik’s clothing and murmuring, yes, sir, and doing it all with a grin, in that moment utterly unafraid.  
  
At this point the panic floods back, albeit for a slightly different reason, involving those memories and his suddenly iron-hard cock signaling its excitement at the curve of that backside, nestled so temptingly into his hip.  
  
He _can’t_ wake Charles that way. Even given everything they’ve accomplished, there’s got to be a line. And he’s quite sure that “good morning, I’ve got an enormous erection from thinking about you” is far beyond it.  
  
The decision’s made for him, though, because Charles sighs and yawns and rolls over, tucking his face into Erik’s chest. Murmurs something incomprehensible that’s probably meant to be a greeting.  
  
“Good morning,” Erik agrees, speaking to the tangle of dark hair, because it is. “Would you like me to make you tea?”  
  
“Tea…”  
  
“Yes? With extra sugar?”  
  
“I like sugar.” Charles blinks, yawns again, opens his eyes. “I like you. Are we naked?”  
  
“Yes? Is that…all right?”  
  
“I thought I was having a very realistic dream…Are you inching away from me?”  
  
Erik stops trying to maneuver his hips and his persistent erection away from a sleepily uncoordinated elbow. “No.”  
  
“Hmm.”  
  
“Are you…how are you feeling?”  
  
Charles considers this question lazily, head settled on Erik’s chest. “I’m all right.”  
  
“Are you—”  
  
“I really am.” Charles wriggles around, balances on an elbow, finds Erik’s eyes. He’s smiling, the wondering upward curve containing laughter, not shouted to the world but simply quietly real. “I’m fine. Or—you know. Not fine, exactly, but. Happy.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik says, and kisses him. Charles kisses back, with conviction. “And I love you. I thought—I was thinking. This morning.”  
  
“I thought you were sleeping.”  
  
“I was doing that, too. But I wanted to ask you something.”  
  
“Anything.” He picks up the closest hand. Weaves their fingers together. “Do you not want to sleep naked?” He’ll understand, if that’s the case. If Charles can’t quite be comfortable so exposed and unaware.  
  
“No. I mean, no, I like being naked. Around you—only around you, please.”  
  
“Of course,” Erik says, and cuddles him a bit too emphatically. Charles doesn’t argue, and even relaxes into the hold, secure. “Ask me. Whatever you need.”  
  
Lips brush his jawline, feather-light and amused. “I need you, then. Like this. But what I wanted to say… _complete_ bed rest? Seriously?”  
  
“Very seriously.” He catches that pointed chin with one hand. Gets summer-twilight eyes to meet his own. This _is_ serious, and his stomach twists at the thought of anything going wrong. “No weight on your knee at all. Let it heal.”  
  
“Yes, sir. I was hoping to ask you…if I’m trapped in bed for two weeks…I’ll need something to do. I’ll end up…thinking too much, otherwise. Can you—”  
  
“I can think of ways to keep you occupied.”  
  
“You can’t actually have sex with me every single minute of every day for fourteen days.”  
  
“Are you sure about that? And, can I what?”  
  
“If you would…” Charles pauses, nibbles at his bottom lip, but lets it go and looks up and smiles. “In between all the sex, then. Yesterday, while you were making dinner…I was thinking about cupcakes.”  
  
“You…would like me to bake you cupcakes?” He’s never been much of a baker, but he’ll try.  
  
“No, sorry, I’m not explaining well. I was thinking about our date. You, and the park, everything you did for me. Everything you want for me. And I wanted to ask…I’m even more out of practice now. I could use a partner. If you wanted to play chess with me again.”  
  
“…Charles,” Erik says, heart breathless and aching as if he’s just run a marathon and found the finish line in sight. “Yes.”  
  
“I could…that card is on my desk. I could email him. Set up an appointment, not soon, but I’m sure he’s got a waiting list anyway, players wanting to audition for club spots—”  
  
“He’ll make time for you.”  
  
“You don’t know that—”  
  
“I saw the way he looked at you, after you won.” And, privately, Erik will ensure that time is made if necessary. But he rather thinks he won’t have to. Charles can impress international chess champions all on his own. Already has.  
  
“I’ll need to be able to leave the bed,” Charles says. “I can’t—it’ll have to be public, to prove that I’m—well, that I am that good. Exhibition matches. I—you’ll be there. With me.”  
  
Not a question. A certainty: Charles believes that, believes that Erik will stand at his side, in crowds and unfamiliar rooms.  
  
“I love you,” Erik says, which is a yes, and Charles must hear the iron determination in the words, because those eyes get impossibly brighter and bluer in reply. “I’ll play with you whenever you’d like. You may grow tired of beating me, however.”  
  
“You’re better than you think you are,” Charles says, and stretches up to kiss him on the lips, still lying down, “you make me better, too,” and for a fleeting instant Erik hears the echo of his own thoughts and wonders whether they’re really talking about chess, but Charles is kissing him and that elation outweighs any other considerations.  
  
“I’ll call Emma later,” Charles adds, speaking into the kiss, “she’ll be happy if she can at least use me for something,” and Erik sits up and says _“What?”_ before comprehending. “Oh.”  
  
“Yes, oh.” Laughing, now. The blue of those eyes invites him into the joke; Erik sighs and runs a proprietary hand through merry waves of dark hair. “From here?”  
  
“From here.” Charles turns his head, kisses the inside of Erik’s wrist, tongue sneaking out to tease thin skin and the pulse in his veins. “I’m only consulting for her. Looking over those prospective clients. It’s something I can do, and I’d like to.”  
  
“…can you?”  
  
“Oh…yes.” One more kiss. “Most of them won’t be—like him. Shaw. And if they are…Emma’s trusted my judgment before. If I can tell her no, about the ones that are, then…I’d like to think it makes a difference. If I can’t—take anyone’s place—and I wouldn’t, anyway, I’m yours—”  
  
“Yes, you _are_.”  
  
“Yes, I am. And if I’m not taking any of them, she’ll turn the most sadistic ones away. Politely, of course. But she needs to know what they’ll want, and I’m…good at knowing. I always was.”  
  
Erik loops fingers into the dark hair, tips Charles’s head back, kisses him: you knew me then. You’re thinking about the future now. Thank you for all of it. Charles kisses back: I love you, I want you, I know.  
  
“I can bring over your laptop. Or your chess set. Or tea. I never did make you tea; do you want breakfast?” There’s another question he wants to ask, a question he’s had simmering at the back of his mind since opening his eyes. It’s not wholly formed, still coalescing, but it’s centered around one idea: he wants this, waking up with Charles and making him tea in the house with the decadent bed and the companionable tabletop chess set and the newly designed studio filled with shimmering metal out back, forever.  
  
“Yes,” Charles says meditatively, “but not yet. I want one more thing. I _am_ good at knowing what clients want, after all. And you wanting me was rather…hard to miss, when I woke up.”  
  
“I was—Charles. No.” No words. Not for this. Not with those words slicing through the sunbeams, unmistakable and cruel. “I’m not—I thought you knew—I’m not your client, you’re not—I love you, Charles, please.”  
  
“Oh—” Charles shakes his head, reaches up, tugs Erik’s head down so they’re nose to nose amid silky sheets. “No. I’m sorry. Bad choice of words. I only meant, I liked waking up that way. Knowing that you could look at me, even with all this, and want me, so much…I’m so in love with you it almost doesn’t feel real. I can’t—I never even dreamed about this. I thought—I used to pretend—you might want to visit me, sometimes, after everything.”  
  
The wistfulness in those words nearly breaks his heart all over again. He wants to banish it permanently; he wants to take all those lonely painful nights and replace them with tea and cupcakes and kept promises. He can’t, and in any case to do so would be to change the person in his arms into someone else, and he wants all of Charles, every last story and scar and strength that complements his own.  
  
But he can be here now. And he can give Charles all the love that those blue eyes deserve. Because they’ve reminded him how.  
  
He wants to ask that unvoiced question very badly. It’s on the tip of his tongue.  
  
But if he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right. Charles deserves that, too.  
  
He wonders what Charles will say, how those cracked-sapphire eyes will look, when he says the words. He’s willing to bet that they’ll be unexpected. He hopes they’ll be welcome. They might not be believed.  
  
“I wouldn’t’ve visited you,” he says, “because I’d never have left. I’d’ve taken you home, or asked to come home with you, but after that first night, it was always going to be you. No one else, for me.”  
  
“Erik,” Charles whispers, and blinks, and Erik realizes he’s blinking back tears, catching the morning and throwing the light out in multifaceted glints, “I love you.”  
  
“And I love you.” He skims thumbtips over freckled cheeks, feeling the dampness collected in long eyelashes, not falling free. “So…I’m still not your client. And you’re not here to please me. But…if you did…want to please me…”  
  
“It would make me happy to please you,” Charles murmurs promptly, picking up on the cue, and there’s a sparkle of conspiratorial mischief in the oceans, buried treasure-gleams under outgoing tides, and that’s a good thing, because Erik’s not entirely convinced he could do this otherwise. “Is there anything that…would? Please you?”  
  
“I am rather partial to you naked.”  
  
“You already have that.”  
  
“True.” He nudges Charles over onto his back, among the hills and valleys of the sheets. Sets a finger at the hollow of his collarbone, the small tantalizing drip of skin. Charles breathes in, eyes huge.  
  
“I enjoy freckles. And blue eyes. And someone who can keep up with me, who can take everything I demand, who might even beg me for more…” He trails the finger lower, one long unbroken line across compact muscle, the flat plane of that inviting stomach. There aren’t as many freckles there, but they begin again on the nearest hip, the unscarred one, energetic explosions of cinnamon stars. “Can you do that for me, Charles?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles whispers, more a gasp than a word, as if startled by the need for air. “Yes, sir.”  
  
“Then I think we can come to some agreement.” He leans forward and closes his lips around a flat hard nipple and Charles moans his name, eyes falling shut, hips lifting. He stops. Pulls away. “I also value obedience. Show me that you can listen.”  
  
“I—you haven’t said—”  
  
“Oh. Apologies, then.” Delivered with a kiss just above the dimple of that belly button; Charles lifts his head off the bed to look, and there’s laughter in those eyes. They’re all right, then. “Don’t move unless I tell you to. Especially not your legs. Clear?”  
  
“Yes, sir.” Definitely laughter; well, fair enough, but that does mean Charles isn’t nearly far enough gone into incandescent surrender. He’ll have to do something about that.  
  
One eyebrow arches at him, a feat that really shouldn’t be possible while lying sprawled across a mattress. “Anything else? Sir.”  
  
“ _Really_ ,” Erik says, and sets a hand over that star-spangled hip, pressing down hard enough that it’ll register, if not quite hurt. “Feeling cheeky, are you?”  
  
“You did say you wanted me to ask for more.”  
  
He presses the fingers in a bit harder, reminders etched on skin; Charles sighs, and the eyes lose a bit of focus. But they meet his, when Erik adds, softly, “I also want you to be honest. You know I want that,” and he’s slipping out of his role and he doesn’t care, when Charles smiles with that upward flick of lips and nods and drifts a hand down to cover his. “I know. I’ll tell you.”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“Yes, you do, sir.”  
  
“Hmm,” Erik says, and considers him, spread out over the jewel-colored sheets like a banquet of decadence, rare and exotic and hard-won. He’s got one hand on the freckles and the other in dark hair, and the evidence of want is painted in the rigid line of Charles’s cock, in rapid breaths, in the faint notes of vanilla and sandalwood and sex and skin from the bottle he’d left half-open on the table. The world is very beautiful and clear.  
  
“What would you like? Tell me.”  
  
“Oh, that’s hardly fair.”  
  
“You enjoy it when I ask you for difficult things. Words, please.”  
  
“I enjoy it when you tie me to the bed and use me until I scream and order me not to come,” Charles grumbles, and Erik goes very still with astonishment, because since when is tying down those lovely wrists an option they can discuss? But Charles has continued, and so he tries to listen.  
  
“…I would like you to touch me. I want—do you want details, then?—I’d like your mouth on me, sir. On my cock. Hot, and wet, and gentle, but persistent, and you’d suck at me until I couldn’t take it, until I was begging to be allowed to come, and you’d say no, not yet, because you know I can take more…you’d open me up with your fingers, then. Two, because I’m asking for that. Sliding inside me, making me ready for you, making me ache for you…sir, I’m going to have to stop unless you actually want me to come.”  
  
“Oh,” Erik manages, panting, barely resisting the urge to shake himself, like throwing off cold water. Those words, that voice…he _had_ asked Charles to talk. This is Charles being obedient. For him. Except, because this _is_ Charles, there’s always a little more, freely given, unexpected.  
  
And he wouldn’t want this any other way.  
  
Besides, there’s a phrase in there clamoring for his attention. “You…you said…you’d want my fingers inside you. You’d want…me inside you?”  
  
Charles looks at him, and there’s that honesty again, complete and unashamed and pure. Not about the roles, or the request. Not now. “Yes, I do.”  
  
“You…”  
  
“I’m sure. I’m not going to say I’m not nervous—” That’s obvious, too, unconcealed and left at the surface for him to read. “—but I’m not afraid of you. And I _know_ how good this can be, with you.”  
  
“I…love you…what if I…I don’t want to hurt you.”  
  
“You won’t.” Charles is still looking at him, serenely confident. “If you mean physically, you know everything’s healed. You were there for that doctor’s visit. If you mean…anything else, then please trust me. I’m not sure I can…come for you, that way, but we’ll never know unless we try, and I want to, right here, right now, so please fuck me before I change my mind and have the panic attack after all?”  
  
“Is that—are you feeling like—”  
  
“No!”  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, sitting there with his hand resting lightly over his own inflicted bruise on a too-breakable hip, marks of passion and desire darkening into existence, “I’m scared.”  
  
And Charles whispers back, “So am I.”  
  
“Then—”  
  
“But I don’t want to be. And I want you. I want this. I—” Charles stops, laughs, looks amazed at himself. “I _want_ something. I want to play chess against the best players in the world, and I want to remodel the entire house and let you try to teach me to cook, and I want to have sex with you, Erik, right now.”  
  
“Oh my god,” Erik says, blasphemy for which his mother’d probably rap his knuckles with a rolling pin, but that’s Charles laughing and flushing pink at the admission and licking his lips in an unmistakable invitation, and around them the world quietly picks itself up and spins around and becomes brand-new.  
  
“Well?” Charles offers, arms flung dramatically across the mattress; “Wait,” Erik says, mostly just to see what’ll happen, “what about everything else you were saying, my mouth and your cock and my hands—”  
  
“Don’t make me throw this pillow at your head, sir. It’s very happy where it is.”  
  
“Oh, well, for the sake of the pillows…” He jumps off the bed. Grabs lube from the drawer. Runs back and leans down and licks one long wet stripe along Charles’s cock, just because. Enjoys the resultant full-body shiver.  
  
“I told you not to move. Also, we’re doing all of those things—everything you said—later.”  
  
“Please.” Charles sneaks a hand over and wraps it around Erik’s cock, which tightens even more at the attention, heavy between his legs, riding the tingling he can feel all down his spine. “You enjoyed my hands, yesterday…”  
  
Erik groans and pushes his hips forward, and that talented hand slides along his shaft, just the right amount of tightness and a tiny twist at the end. He’s already wet with the thought, himself getting to be inside Charles, again, at last, Charles asking for it, a turn of events he’d deliberately never allowed himself to hope for…  
  
Charles catches the drops as they bead at the head of his cock. Brings the finger to that sinfully pink mouth, and licks it leisurely.  
  
“Oh god,” Erik says again.  
  
“Hmm?” Charles’s expression is utterly innocent. Wide-eyed. “See something you like?”  
  
“Yes. You.” He pauses. Grabs two of those helpful pillows; Charles had offered their services, after all. “May I?”  
  
A slightly confused nod; Erik lifts that fragile leg as gingerly as possible and resettles it into fluff. Then slips one large hand under Charles’s hips, and nudges the second pillow underneath. Considers the angle. “Will this work?”  
  
“I think so, yes…” Trying not to laugh; Erik wants to laugh too, happiness pervading every atom of his body, but instead he leans down and kisses merry lips, forceful and assertive, until they part and go pliant under his. He kisses the line of that throat, then, moving lower; teeth and tongue and the imprint of his mouth, and Charles is making little gasps and tipping his head to the side, baring neck and shoulder and body for the taking.  
  
“Mine,” he breathes against hot wet skin, “I love you,” and Charles shudders helplessly with the words.  
  
“I want you,” he promises to the trail of curling hair just above that flushed thick weight of arousal, licking soft skin that’s purposefully not where his submissive wants it the most, “and I’m going to fuck you, because you asked me to,” and Charles makes a sound that begins as his name and, when Erik employs tongue in a certain place, ends as a kind of tiny airless scream.  
  
He finds the lube with one hand—nothing special, he thinks at first, only an ordinary tube, and then he feels it warm and tingle as it spreads across his fingers, and he grins—and strokes a hand up the nearest taut thigh, and finds that spot, the little crinkle of muscle all displayed for him, propped up on pillow-fluff and waiting. “Still good?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles whispers, and that’s true, surprisingly so; he can hear it in the breathing, excited but relaxed, rhythmic and trusting, slipping into the serenity of that blue-hued space where nothing else is allowed to exist, only Erik’s voice and touch and love. “Yes.”  
  
“Good. Tell me if we need to stop—if you even think we might be needing to stop—anything at all. Understand?”  
  
A little bit of focus returns to those eyes, when Charles meets his gaze. “Yes.”  
  
“Perfect,” Erik says, and eases one finger, shining with lube, inside him.  
  
Charles gasps and goes still and the bottomless eyes are very dark, black swallowing the sapphires. But he nods, gaze not leaving Erik’s face, and the message is clear: I trust you, this is us, go on.  
  
Erik does. Two fingers, sliding in and out, working Charles open for him; he watches as that tight space yields and loosens and grows slick, sleek wet sounds from the motion of it. Charles is breathing in small pants, openmouthed, rocking hips up into his hand; Erik crooks his fingers, seeking that spot, and rubs.  
  
Charles actually screams his name. And that untouched thickness of his cock jumps, smearing sticky pools onto pale skin; but he doesn’t come, though his knuckles’re white, clinging to the pillows. “Erik, Erik, please—”  
  
“You want me inside you? You want to come with me inside you?” I’m not sure I can, Charles’d said. Erik thinks, looking at him now, that Charles very definitely can, and therefore it’s his, Erik’s, mission to demonstrate the fact.  
  
Charles moans again, helpless. “Please…”  
  
“Soon.” Three fingers, just to be sure; they disappear into that hole, so wet and stretched, muscles fluttering around the rim, and Charles shudders from head to toe. Erik strokes that bundle of nerve endings once more, and hears the sob, sees the tiny pulse at the swollen and doubtless aching head before Charles gets his reactions under control, quivering from the near-orgasm.  
  
“When I say you can,” he instructs, and slips his fingers out—another sob—and away, and lines himself up, on his knees, hands steadying those hips. Charles can’t move much; shouldn’t move much, should be kept safe.  
  
Charles shivers, and that stretched space shivers too, vain little flickers of contraction and need. Erik bends down and kisses his shoulder, and then pushes forward, slow.  
  
He knows he’s large. He knows that even with all the care he’s taken, Charles is no longer used to that. On top of this, has been hurt, torn and broken. He feels all the slick heat tighten around him, just the very tip, and has to bite into his lip to regain self-control, caught between heart-pounding fear and eruption on the spot.  
  
“Charles…?”  
  
Eyelashes tremble for a moment, then lift. And the expression in those eyes is like the dawn of the universe. The first sunrise, and the sound of joy.  
  
“Go on,” Charles says. “Please.”  
  
So he does. With the next thrust, the fullest part of himself’s inside Charles, who gasps and clenches around him, hands fastening on his biceps and digging in. “Erik…”  
  
“Did I hurt you?”  
  
“No…no, I don’t think…I just…you’re so big, it’s so much, and I…I can’t…”  
  
“Shh.” He kisses the tip of Charles’s nose, the corner of bitten lips, waiting even though his body’s straining to push forward. “Tell me if you want to stop.”  
  
“I want you.”  
  
“Then relax. Please.” He’s using both hands for support and balance, trying to ensure that no movement jostles that knee; he’s not sure he can spare one, but he tries, bracing himself on one arm, running a hand through sweat-damp hair as Charles breathes into his shoulder, cradling those tense muscles against his own. “It’s all right, you’re all right, I love you, just breathe, and relax for me, look at me, you can do that, _kätzchen_ …”  
  
“Kittens again,” Charles murmurs shakily. “I love you, Erik.”  
  
“I know. Better?”  
  
“Yes. You can move…”  
  
“Like this?”  
  
“Oh—!”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“ _Yes_ like that—!”  
  
He’s not going to last long, but that’s unimportant this time, this first time, Charles moaning and shuddering in his arms, moaning his name with every thrust; they’ll have other times, more times, he knows that with every last thrilled atom of his heart, and so he slides out and then back in, all the way in one delicious plunge, right down to the base. Charles cries his name, body arching in response.  
  
“So beautiful,” Erik gasps, and kisses him again, messy and sloppy and full of need and demand, tasting himself on Charles’s tongue from the earlier licking of fingers. Charles whimpers, sounding utterly abandoned, trying to chase after him when Erik pulls away.  
  
“Wait,” he says, and rubs his thumb over those kiss-stained lips. Charles opens them and takes the thumb in and licks it, sucking, nibbling, uncoordinated and wordless; Erik hadn’t been asking, but that’s a good sign, that’s Charles falling back into the inarticulate world of sensation and submission, dreamlike and sweetly malleable in his hands.  
  
His cock tightens, swells, at the sight, pushing deeper into that compliant body; no resistance at all now, as Charles sighs and moves languidly with him.  
  
He slips two fingers into that lush wet mouth alongside the thumb, because he can, because Charles sighs again and a tremor runs from his head to his toes, a wave of pleasure. “Can you hear me?”  
  
A heartbeat; then a nod, and Charles licks the v-shaped line of skin between his fingers, once.  
  
“Good. You remember what you told me, that you didn’t think you could, like this…”  
  
The blue eyes look puzzled through the shivers of ecstasy, not comprehending. Erik grins, inwardly and not. “I think you can.”  
  
It takes a second, but all the blue lights up with comprehension, with excitement even through the haze of need: yes! And Erik grins again. Pulls back, slams forward, not gentle, feeling the gasp around his hand.  
  
“You want that, don’t you? You want to come like this, from my cock inside you? You want me to tell you that you can?”  
  
Charles moans around the muffling fingers, eyes fluttering shut. “No,” Erik orders, “eyes open, look at me,” and moves inside him, shifting angles, making his cock rub along that electric spot, drawn out and inexorable, and Charles tries to move with him and Erik stops and demands, “Remember what I asked, you don’t get to move,” and Charles sobs, head tossing futile and restless over the pillow, but stills beneath his weight.  
  
“Good,” he praises one more time, “so good, for me, all mine, Charles, no one else’s,” and then moves because he can’t wait, thrusting into that tight welcoming space over and over, harder and faster until his hips stutter and the climax hits like a thunderstorm through his body, white-hot and abrupt, and he feels himself coming inside Charles, pulse after pulse of wet heat; Charles is trembling everywhere, not seeing him, only lifting his hips into Erik’s over and over, desperately seeking stimulation, friction, release.  
  
Erik, panting in the aftermath, clinging to one last thought, leans down and whispers in the curve of one ear, “ _my_ submissive, Charles, you come when I say, and I’m telling you now, so come,” and Charles doesn’t even make a sound, only stops moving, head falling back, suspended at the peak, and his cock spills between their bodies, seemingly endless orgasm.  
  
As that crystalline and shining instant fades, he makes himself move, fingers out of that slack mouth, cock very gingerly sliding free of slick loosened muscle. The head rubs across the sensitive rim, clumsy; Charles whimpers, sounding disoriented, exhausted. “Shh,” Erik tells him, “You’re all right, you were so good, you were wonderful, we’re done, come here…”  
  
He gets Charles into his arms—they’ll need to clean up later, but not yet—and kisses his temple, right over that old rough knot of electrode-shaped scars. Rubs his back, until the shivering stops, until Charles inhales and the sound is less uneven. “Erik…”  
  
“Awake, yet?”  
  
“Erik…”  
  
“Ah. Not yet, then.”  
  
“Mmm. Hold me.”  
  
“I am.” One more kiss. “You can feel that, correct?”  
  
“Yes.” One blue eye peeks out from under hair, amused, sleepy. “I feel…brilliant. Like fireworks. Everything sort of lit up inside, and extremely happy, and very tired…Erik?”  
  
“Yes?” He understands. He feels the same.  
  
“That was…I love you.”  
  
Not a thank you; there’s no need. There won’t be, not for this. He tightens his arms around Charles. “Fireworks here as well. Are you all right?”  
  
“Ah…” Stretching, careful, testing. “Yes. I don’t want to move for a while, but that’s only because you wore me out, sir.”  
  
“Still?”  
  
“For now…” Charles yawns. “While you’re holding me. If you don’t mind.”  
  
“I don’t mind.” He brushes the hair out of the other eye. “What about…not physically, though. Was this all right?”  
  
And Charles smiles at him, content, weary, beautiful. The pillows’ve landed in various places, one on the floor and one teetering on the edge of the bed; the sunlight’s wandered in again, heedless of privacy, and outlines those long eyelashes with gold.  
  
“I wasn’t expecting it to be, if you want me to be honest. I thought I’d need to stop. To breathe. But you were so careful, with me, checking in, asking how I was…”  
  
“I’ll always ask.” He needs to know. For them both.  
  
“Yes. You’re still you, and you’re brilliant, and I’m still me.” Charles looks at him through the sunbeam. The gold dances in his eyes, flirting with the blue. “It might not be this good every time. I won’t know until we try. But this is us, and I know what I can handle, physically I mean, and I remember what I like, and if I’m being honest with you, and with myself, well. My self very much wants this with you. Sir.”  
  
“I want you,” Erik says, to those so-blue eyes, “always. You amaze me, Charles. You—I don’t know what I did to deserve you, that night. Why you wanted me. But I—” He’s not good at this, at grand declarations. Better at gestures, solid tangible demonstrations. “I’m glad you did,” he finishes finally, and wraps his hand around one slim wrist, over tendons and bone, over the memory of handcuff-wounds and bruises, replaced by his touch.  
  
Charles reaches up and rests his own hand over Erik’s, on his wrist, holding on. Says, simply, “So am I.”


	22. Charles And Erik Have A Very Happy Ending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they talk about the future, Charles makes a decision, and Erik finally asks that one certain question. Also, very much porn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies that this wasn't up Monday! I forgot Monday was a holiday, and then our apartment basically imploded--without all the dreadful detail, let's just say we're getting two new toilets, a new floor in the upstairs bathroom, and repainting the downstairs. So that happened.
> 
> This is the last Charles-and-Erik POV chapter--but Emma, of course, will get her Epilogue. Hopefully Monday. Fingers crossed.

Two weeks and six days later, and Charles stands at the top of the stairs, balancing very precisely on his own two feet, and stares at the sign pinned up across the steps. Shouts, “Erik!”  
  
Erik appears below, looking innocent; this expression swiftly translates into exasperated affection. “Go back to bed!”  
  
“Yes, that’s what your sign says!” It does. Specifically, it says, in Erik’s spiky handwriting, _Don’t even think about it, Charles, go back to bed._  
  
“I’m capable of walking, you know!”  
  
“Just because your doctors said you could get up,” Erik retorts, “that does not automatically make you ready for stairs. I love you. What did you need?”  
  
“Love you. Were you busy? I could use your help with something, but it isn’t urgent.”  
  
“I need to do some work on that piece for the charity, but it can wait.” Erik’s already halfway up the stairs, hair rumpled, a streak of pencil-dust from the morning’s design sketches on his face. Charles knows about this particular piece; it’s going to be bronze, designed for a foundation that provides assistance for the families of people diagnosed with cancer, offering support and resources. Erik’s not being paid for this one; he knows that too.  
  
It’s a cool day. Rainy earlier and likely again; the scent of it lingers, in wool and wood and silken air. Ozone and lightness, like the touch of mist around corners and eaves. The construction’s all but finished; off in the distance, there’s a clank of ladders and beams, reconstructing the side of the house around the newly installed elevator. It’s in a slightly awkward location, mostly because there’d not been many other options, but it won’t detract from the appearance; if anything, the house feels more open, more airy, perking up after years of gloom and neglect. He’d opened some of the downstairs windows for the first time in years, letting light in for the workmen.  
  
Erik’s in front of him now, pointedly detaching and reattaching the sign on its string across the staircase, eyes happy but holding a hint of concern, grey and green as the mist over damp grass. “They need to tell me which finish they’d prefer on the surface, in any case. I was just sending over the options. How can I help?”  
  
“First, you can kiss me.”  
  
Erik grins and does, large hands buried possessively in his hair, tipping his head back; Charles feels that kiss all the way to his toes, scorching heat that doesn’t burn, that only leaves him breathless and molten with desire. Liquid metal, flowing over flame.  
  
He wraps his arms around that slim waist. Erik’s built like a cheetah, long-limbed and lean and all powerful grace. Charles loves the feel of him. Loves waking up beside him in the mornings. Loves each tiny heart-skip at the renewed knowledge.  
  
“Not that I’m objecting,” Erik says, nuzzling at his ear, “but _first_ implies _second_ , Charles. Tell me what you need.”  
  
“Mmm…do that again, please…and come with me.”  
  
“Bedroom?”  
  
“Yes, but…” As much as he’s enjoying the scrape of Erik’s teeth along his neck, he actually does have a reason for asking. He tries to disentangle himself; long arms complicate this endeavor. “You may have to let go of me for a minute.”  
  
“Never.”  
  
“Oh…” He pauses with Erik’s hand remaining on his hip. He knows he’s blushing; he’s not yet sure how to respond when Erik says those words. He believes them, that’s not in doubt. But he’s not had much experience with this kind of iron-clad devotion.  
  
He’ll get better at it. He’ll have the time. Erik’s not, as has been proven time and again, going anywhere.  
  
He finds himself smiling at the thought.  
  
“Charles?” Erik strokes hair out of his face even though it doesn’t currently need the assistance. Glances at the bed as if considering whether to toss him into it, and then whether to enfold him in blankets and tea or continue the kissing minus clothes.  
  
“I’m happy,” Charles says, and knows that it’s true. “Until they finish putting in that elevator, you’re helping me with the stairs, you understand.”  
  
“Just say the word. I enjoy sweeping you off your feet. And so: why are you still standing up?”  
  
“Because I need to get something. Sit down.”  
  
Erik raises an eyebrow at him, but does. Charles limps the few steps to his desk, picks up the sheaf of papers, limps back. Erik’s arm goes around him instantly when he sits on the edge of the mattress. It’s instinctive and familiar; and so is his own lean into the comfortable support.  
  
“It’s not so much wanting your help, I suppose, as…I wanted to do this with you here. And I had an idea. Sort of a proposal. Sort of long-term, if you say yes—what?”  
  
“Nothing. Go on. What is all this?”  
  
“Hmm.” That’d been a different flicker of emotion in those eyes, almost disappointed but also excited, and Charles has no clue how to reconcile those two poles. “Well…you know I’d been planning to sell the company. I still am; I don’t want it. I don’t want the memories. That’s the first part; that’s what all this is, really, waiting for me to sign control over to the board of directors. Paperwork.”  
  
“You want me here for that.” Not a question; Erik’s arm tightens around him. “Of course.”  
  
“I always want you here, but yes. The idea I had, though…they’re giving me quite a lot of money. Generous terms. And I know we’ll need some of it—the renovations, the—medical expenses—but that, ah. Won’t make much of a dent.” He hands Erik the relevant sheet. Erik’s eyebrows fly up.  
  
“Perhaps we should just buy a new house. Or a small island. Or several. That’s being _quite_ generous.”  
  
“I think some of them feel guilty about technically taking my inheritance. They shouldn’t, but I’m hardly going to argue. We can be more liberal with the renovations, though. And that was the other part. If I’m—if we’re—going to have this…all of this…I want to do something with it.” He looks up at Erik’s face. Tries to get all the conviction that he feels into his voice, even though he’s not quite worked out the details.  
  
“We have a lot of room here. And I know that Emma takes care of her escorts, she’s careful, but sometimes they do need somewhere to go, like the time Angel was behind on her rent, or sometimes people might want a safe space, right, and you could, I don’t know, run art classes, Piotr’s little sister is actually very good and he can’t afford much instruction, and I could offer chess games if anyone’s interested, or possibly science, I never did finish the PhD but I do know quite a bit about—why are you smiling?”  
  
“You’re babbling,” Erik observes. “I like it. You’ve thought about this, haven’t you? Turning our house into a home for wayward escorts?”  
  
“Not wayward.” Erik’s still smiling, though, so no objections seem to be forthcoming. “They’d be finding their way. Here. It’s something I’d’ve wanted. Finding someone who would…understand. Does that make sense?”  
  
“It does. You—wait, PhD?” Erik’s now looking at him with an odd mix of astonishment and incredulous admiration. Charles rather likes that look. “I knew you went to Oxford, you said as much, but—you said you were twenty-two! When we met!”  
  
“I am,” Charles says, and then pauses, shocked. “For…three more weeks. When did that happen?”  
  
“In between you seducing me and getting me to fall in love with you and saving my life,” Erik says dryly. “How old were you when you left for university, then? Eleven?”  
  
“Fifteen,” Charles retorts, “I was a science-experiment child prodigy, honestly, Erik, what did you expect?” And then they _both_ look surprised, because he’s just made a joke about it, because he can.  
  
“Fifteen,” Erik echoes, shaking his head; and his hand is gentle when it brushes the scars, settling the weight of a thumb over his temple, calloused and intimate. The rain murmurs, returning without fanfare beyond window-pane glass. “I can only imagine how terrifying you must’ve been.”  
  
“I’m hardly terrifying.”  
  
“Yes, you are. To everyone’s peace of mind. How many of your professors had fantasies about you, I wonder?”  
  
“I could actually answer that for you if you—”  
  
Erik growls “No,” and lunges forward to kiss him again, delicious and proprietary. “Mine, Charles.”  
  
“Yes, sir.” This, coupled with his best demure look, earns another growl, playful but grumbling thunderstorms. Just a hint of lightning, showing through. “I don’t like the idea of them taking advantage of you.”  
  
“Oh, please. If anything it was the other way around. I could go back, even. Finish. Not back to Oxford, but someplace here. If not the PhD, at least the teaching credential, the certifications…I always liked having students.”  
  
“I’m assuming you mean finish your degree and not your professors. You know I’ll be here if you decide you ever want to. Whatever you want to do.”  
  
“I know,” Charles says, and stretches up, carefully, to initiate the kiss this time. “I know. And no professors. Unless you’re in the mood for roleplay. Sir.”  
  
“That…I may have to take you up on that. But not yet.” Erik looks back at the stack of papers. “Did you want to do this now?”  
  
“I think so, yes. Got a pen?”  
  
“There’s one on your desk. Don’t get up.” Erik comes back with it, holds it out. Charles takes it and kisses the fingers, lightly. “Thank you. Come sit with me?”  
  
There’re a lot of forms. Signatures in multiple places. Erik sits beside him, hand at his back, warm and steady. Charles scribbles his name, and thinks about what he’s giving up, and what he wants, and is absolutely confident when he does.  
  
It’s still nice to have the hand there. To lean back slightly and feel Erik’s presence.  
  
He sets the pen down. Looks up. “Done.”  
  
“Are you…”  
  
“I’m all right.” He is. He feels lighter than he has in years. A heaviness lifted. The rain splashes merrily against the glass and slides down in long streamers, curious and celebratory. “I’ll send these back this afternoon. And it’ll be over.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik says, eyes anxious despite the smile. “And—I don’t think I told you yes, earlier. But yes. To your idea. Though I’m not certain I’d be the best instructor, if anyone even wants to learn sculpting techniques. I’ve not exactly been honing my people skills over the years.”  
  
“I think you have excellent people skills.” He nudges a shoulder into Erik’s. “Even Emma likes you. Begrudgingly, mind you. And I like you. Really yes, though? If you don’t want—you can say no.”  
  
Erik drops a kiss on the top of his head. “Really yes, Charles. For you. I want to come home to you, and adopt all your fellow escorts, and teach you and them how to make proper spaetzle. I love that you want to do this. I love you. I—can you wait here? For a moment?”  
  
“What? Why?”  
  
“Just trust me. I’ll be right back. All right?”  
  
“Yes, fine, but—where’re you going?”  
  
“No questions, either.”  
  
“But—”  
  
“Orders,” Erik says cheerfully, and then runs back to kiss him one more time, and then back to the door. “I just have to get something—”  
  
“Well, hurry up!” Charles shouts, grinning, at the door. Belatedly adds, “sir!” and hears Erik laugh, from the stairs.  
  
Getting something? Getting what? What more could they want? He does get up, but only to set the pile of papers back on his desk for safekeeping. Then flops back onto his—their—bed, which bounces with anticipation. One of the pillows tips over and hits him in the face; he grabs it and sits up. His knee twinges a bit, but not badly. Nothing hurts.  
  
Nothing hurts.  
  
He’s got Erik, he’s got a way to make life better for other people, maybe, and he’s got the future stretching out ahead of him, open and glimmering with possibilities. And he’s happy.  
  
Erik said yes. To building that future with him.  
  
The rain gets harder, tapdancing with anticipation. He can practically feel it, along his skin. Electric and elemental and eager.  
  
It makes the hairs stand up, on his arm; makes him want to laugh, and run out and stand giddily under the pounding drops, and change the world. And he gets to change the world, to build something good, with Erik at his side.  
  
With Erik’s hands on his skin. He lifts one hand, studies his wrist, traces the invisible line of it with his eyes, where Erik’s fingers might rest, have rested, holding him down. That’s elemental, too. Like the rain. Like weeping for joy.  
  
Like that loving voice giving him orders, offering praise, telling him yes and no and wait and good, when he listens, when he wants to listen. Because he’s Erik’s, and he belongs at Erik’s side, and, equally, he knows that Erik wants him there; that Erik will accept all the pieces of him and hold them in trust while Charles comes apart in his hands, shivering with ecstasy and intensity and release.  
  
The rain rustles along the walls, sweet silvery susurration. Charles, still gazing at his wrist, flexes his fingers, testing, recalling. There’s still an open bottle of lube on the table. It peeks back at him, all innocuous suggestion.  
  
He knows that there’ll be bad days. He’s not fine, not completely, not yet. He has nightmares and scars and a knee that doesn’t work properly and they’ll probably have to toss out at least the unpadded steel handcuffs, for himself and for Erik, who’d flinched upon accidentally opening the wrong drawer two days ago. But they can keep the leather cuffs, the soft lined ones with no associations beyond their own; they can keep the scarves, and the clamps, and the paddles, and a few of the items they’d never got round to trying at all.  
  
They can keep what they have. All of it, or almost all, and what’s gone can be always made up in new ways, spaces filled with unexpected discoveries. They’ve got a lot of time. A whole future, waiting.  
  
He very much wants to jump on Erik, figuratively speaking at least, when those pale eyes and sculptor’s hands come back into the room.  
  
He sits there on the bed, grinning at the rain, and wonders what, for their _immediate_ future, Erik’s got planned.  
  
  
  
Erik sprints down the stairs, and hears the shout of “Hurry up, sir!” from the bedroom, and then finds himself laughing, elated and thrilled and vastly entertained and incredibly in love. Charles is _his_ perfect impatient genius submissive, and Erik wants him exactly that way, wants him forever.  
  
Forever, in fact, is precisely the question at hand. As it were. He _is_ about to ask for Charles’s hand, after all.  
  
He’d not been planning to do it on the spot, hasn’t even really planned at all yet—he’d only finished the ring two days before, all graceful intricate elegant bands of different metals, woven into a seamless whole. It’s hiding in his studio in the old greenhouse, now colonized by bronze and steel and torches and works-in-progress. He’s been fortunate that Charles hasn’t walked in on him, having finally been allowed out of bed.  
  
His heart contracts briefly at that thought. Probably always will. He knows how close he’d come to losing those blue eyes permanently. If not at Shaw’s hands, after. After, and self-inflicted.  
  
But that’s changed. That’s different these days. Charles is thinking about the future, about a future, with him. And Erik has to stop, standing by the kitchen door, one hand on the latch, as the rain chatters gleefully above.  
  
Because that’s true. This is true, here and now. And they’re going to be, not merely all right, but _spectacular_.  
  
He hears himself laugh, out loud, and puts one hand over his mouth, and stops, startled and thrilled by the sound.  
  
And then he runs through the drops across the sodden lawn to the studio space, newly reinforced walls and wide windows hung with crystals of mist, and he dives into his working desk, which is actually an antique writing table that holds quite a lot of neatly sorted wire and metal scraps, and the ring is right where he’d left it, folded up in a sleek black finishing cloth because he’d not had time to construct a box, and it gleams at him like it’s just as excited as he is.  
  
That’s probably not possible. Or maybe it is. This ring will get to be worn by Charles all the time, constantly touching that delectable skin.  
  
Erik looks at it. It looks back, smug. “Right,” he says, “well, I made you for him, so you can just remember that,” and then he tucks it safely into his pocket and bolts back to the house, because Charles is waiting and Erik can’t keep him waiting. Perhaps later, and in a very specific bedroom-related situation; but not now.  
  
He takes the stairs two at a time and runs into the bedroom and then forgets how to talk, because Charles is sitting there surrounded by a pool of amber lamplight and smiling like the heart of Erik’s universe.  
  
“Charles,” he says.  
  
The eyes dance at him, bluer than all the sheets and pillows, more cheerful than the billowing rain. “Yes?”  
  
“Charles?”  
  
“Still yes?”  
  
“You look happy,” Erik says, because he does.  
  
And that smile melts into something smaller, more private, warmer; Charles holds out a hand for him to take. “I am.”  
  
“I’m glad.” He crosses the room, step by step. He’s breathless, not from the sprint up the stairs, and dripping slightly from the weather, and this moment’s happening right now and it’s nothing like he would’ve pictured and it’s everything he’s ever wanted.  
  
He does take the offered hand. But then, very precisely, gets down on the floor. On one knee.  
  
“Erik, you—” Charles stops. Those eyes go wider than he’s ever seen them, one hand over lips in a gesture of shock that Erik doesn’t think he knows he’s made; through fingers, Charles whispers, “Erik, are you—you aren’t—oh my god…”  
  
Erik says, “I am,” and then, “oh, wait, I mean I am asking, not yes I’m god, sorry, this is coming out all wrong, I love you, can I please start over,” and Charles gets out, through the sudden collision of laughter and tears, “yes, please,” and Erik grins.  
  
He reaches for the other hand, as well. Holds them both in his, running his thumbs over the backs, tracing freckles and tendon and bone. Strong hands, and broad, and elegant as well, a tantalizing paradox of scholarship and physicality.  
  
“Charles,” he says, “I love you. I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you, the first time you saw me—because you did, you saw me, not the person I thought I wanted to be. You challenged me, and you made me laugh, and you made me want to—to be what you needed. To make you laugh, as well. And you gave me a second chance when I hurt you, and you trusted me with—you still trust me. With all of you. You want me here with you.”  
  
“I do,” Charles whispers, tears sliding unchecked down his cheeks, catching in the curve of his luminous smile; Erik pauses to brush some of them away, feeling the wetness on his fingertips.  
  
“I know. I woke up this morning, and I thought—this is right, Charles, you and me, I want this, I want you, you’re the strongest person I know and I want to change the world for you, with you, whatever dreams you have that I can make come true. You asked me about—about making this long-term. About saying yes. And I am saying yes, and I do want you, forever, so please, this is me asking you to marry me, if you can, I know it’s too soon after—it is too soon, I know you weren’t expecting—but if you can just say that you can someday say yes to me too, that’s enough, I can—”  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, the laughter winning out by a slim water-marked margin, “stop. Please. Yes. I’m saying yes. To you.”  
  
“You—you’re saying—”  
  
“I am saying yes.” Charles grabs his hands, squeezes them, grinning through tear-tracks, eyes bright and laughing too. “Not to someday, or eventually, or two weeks from now. To now. I love you, I want to marry you, yes!”  
  
“Yes,” Erik echoes, still dumbfounded—all his terrible sentences worked, Charles is saying yes, Charles feels secure and safe enough to say yes—and at that second the thunder crashes into existence with an earsplitting cheer, and Charles starts laughing even more. “Yes, Erik, positively yes, do you want me to say it again—”  
  
“Yes!” He promptly renders that demand moot, though, by jumping onto the bed and tackling him back into the pillows and kissing those lips so decisively that they end up not talking at all for several minutes, and Erik’s in fact halfway through peeling off that cozy knit sweater when Charles pants into his neck, “Should we go ring-shopping, do you think, or wait until—”  
  
“Oh, fuck!” At least he’s still got his jeans on, if unfastened, and that certain object’s nestled in the pocket where he’d left it; Charles looks rather dismayed at the interruption. “Ah…Erik?”  
  
“Can I see your hand?”  
  
Charles raises both eyebrows, but holds it out. The _yes, sir, now what?_ is heavily implied, but unspoken. Erik grins. “Close your eyes?”  
  
“Oh, really…”  
  
“Am I making that an order? Don’t peek.”  
  
“Fine.” Charles shuts his eyes and lets his finger be kissed, right where that metal band’s about to curl around pale skin; Erik slips the ring over fingertip and joints and down to the spot where it belongs, where it settles home as if it knows.  
  
“You can look now.”  
  
Charles obediently opens both eyes, and looks at his hand, and then says, very quietly, “Oh, Erik,” and then starts to cry again, undramatically.  
  
“Do you…if you don’t like it we can go buy another one, in a store, I can—”  
  
“No,” Charles says, “no, Erik, I love it, I—this is beautiful, you—you made this, for me, when did you—how did you even—it even fits perfectly!”  
  
“I love you.” He tugs Charles into his arms, into his lap; kisses him one more time, cradles the hand in his. “I’m fairly good at estimating sizes. And…I wanted to make this. For you. You do like it?”  
  
“I love it.” Charles touches the woven strands of it, simple unadorned metals in pale hues, copper and white gold and titanium grey, all looped together and bound to each other in a single circle-shape, flowing endlessly around his finger. Erik imagines that he can feel the touch on his own skin, when Charles caresses his metal. “I love you. I’m so in love with you, Erik.”  
  
“I know,” he says again, and lifts that hand to his lips and kisses the back of it. “I’m honored.”  
  
Charles blushes fiercely. “That isn’t—you don’t have to. Say that. I’m already yours.”  
  
“Of course you are. And I’m still honored that you want to be.” He turns the captive hand over. Kisses the delicate inside of that wrist, sensitive fragile skin, pulse beating like wings beneath the surface. Charles gasps. “Erik…”  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“I…we were…if you want…”  
  
“Are you asking me something, Charles?” Punctuated by a nip of teeth, very precisely calculated, along bruiseable flesh. “Ask me nicely.”  
  
“Oh,” Charles says amid another gasp. “Erik, please…”  
  
“Still not a question. Am I going to have to spank you, Charles? To ensure that you listen, when I give you an order? You haven’t asked for anything yet.”  
  
“Oh god,” Charles says, and shivers everywhere, looking up at him. “Yes, sir. You can—you could spank me. If you want that. I am asking. Will you take me to bed, and show me that I’m yours in every possible way, anything you want to do, please, I love you.”  
  
Not exactly specific, but he can let that go; from the way Charles is gazing at him, eyes blue-black as storms at sea, specificity might be a lost cause, and words in general soon to follow. He can work with that. Happily.  
  
He says, aloud, “Not exactly specific, you know,” because he can, and watches the eyes widen.

“Erik—sir—” Another glance at that newly-decorated hand; another smile. “Whatever consequences you’ve got in mind, then. As long as we can do it _now_.”  
  
“So impatient,” Erik observes, running a hand over one freckled shoulder, down an arm, enjoying the way those sturdy muscles flex and quiver at his touch. “Not very submissive of you. But I believe I can forgive you that one.” He pauses to grin, showing all those teeth, hand coming back up to rest on the back of Charles’s neck. Charles breathes in, eyelashes sweeping down for a moment, then lifting.  
  
“Consequences, you said. You can’t…you can’t turn over, can you? On your stomach?”  
  
Blue eyes consider that scarred knee, ruefulness warring with arousal. “Be honest,” he adds, just in case.  
  
“I don’t know. Maybe, on the bed, but…”  
  
But that will demand so much from a healing joint. Pressure, facing down into the mattress. Charles bites his lip; Erik sets a finger there instead, and Charles kisses it, but without quite meeting his eyes.  
  
Not good. He needs to fix this. Stop all the self-doubt before it can begin. Incontrovertibly so.  
  
“You can stand, correct? Not for long. But if you lean on the bed…”  
  
“If I—” A blink, stormclouds passing windily over the blue. “What’re you thinking?”  
  
“I’m thinking that you need to be reminded, Charles. You told me once that you like to feel it, after. That you need…something intense. Would you like that now?”  
  
“Yes,” Charles breathes, sound like truth, like clear-ringing university bells from medieval colleges, echoing lightly in every twisted cobblestone path. “Yes.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“But—Erik, I don’t know if—”  
  
“Do you trust me?” He lifts Charles’s chin, with a gentle finger. Gets those tempestuous eyes to meet his. “Answer me.”  
  
“Yes, I do. Sir.”  
  
“I won’t hurt you. And you’ll tell me if we’re even close to that. But you do want this, and I want to—” He has to stop. A catch in his throat. A knot of words. “I want to give you what you want,” he finishes finally, still holding that sapphire gaze in his. “Will you let me try?”  
  
And Charles smiles, vivid against the grey day, the dark wood of the bedframe, the sound of heartbeats. “Yes, sir.”  
  
Erik swallows again. Can’t find words, looking at him. Seeing all that courage.  
  
He says, “Stand up.” And Charles does, sliding off the bed with abrupt grace, landing on both feet, though keeping a bit more weight on the one.  
  
“Strip. Slowly.”  
  
He watches while Charles smiles in reply, as the sweater disappears in a flurry of blue wool, taking the button-down shirt with it, leaving lovely nutmeg-sprinkled creamy skin exposed. Follows every motion, when Charles flicks open the button of confining trousers and—with a glance up through lowered lashes—slips out of them in one flawless movement that drops all fabric to the carpet.  
  
It’s likely a practiced skill—Charles has many—but he can’t bring himself to care. Because Charles and all those skills are only his, now; because the look in blue eyes during the performance is also only for him, nothing anyone else will ever see.  
  
Charles waits, gazing at him; Erik waits too, letting the pause extend. The world hums with desire, spinning on its axis.  
  
He gets up, hyper-aware of each motion, every movement of muscle. Comes over to Charles, who from the flush over those freckles is aware of all that too, but stands still and lets Erik touch him, hands roaming along his collarbone, his chest, the outline of his hips. In the storm’s heart, the room fills up with topaz lamplight and blue silk sheets and the peaceful tumult of desire.  
  
He settles a hand over the right hip, proprietary. Presses down firmly enough to make the indents visible, the shape of his fingers and thumb; Charles parts his lips, but doesn’t say anything after all. Erik can guess, though, and informs him, with conviction, “Beautiful. And if you say otherwise, you’re insulting my taste. I do know something about art, after all.” And Charles laughs instead of arguing the point.  
  
He does have an idea in mind, if Charles says yes, but they’re not quite there yet. Not far enough. A bit more touching will be necessary; and so he lifts the other hand and sets his index finger over those just-kissed lips and orders, “Mouth,” and Charles breathes in and the blue eyes lose a bit of focus, drifting, under command.  
  
Charles is very skilled with lips and teeth and tongue, and he lavishes attention on the length of Erik’s finger as if it’s Erik’s cock, sucking, stroking, swirling tongue over every inch. Erik, still half-dressed, feels his erection pushing insistently at the front of his jeans; Charles is very obviously enjoying himself as well, arousal visible, hard and flushed and straining against his stomach. Excellent.  
  
He slides the wet finger out of that busy mouth—Charles makes a small displeased sound, which is certainly promising—and trails it lower, making one line, lips to chin to throat to chest to stomach, stopping just above the hungry head of his erection. Charles groans, frustration warring with obedience, and doesn’t move; but his eyes shiver with need.  
  
“Mine,” Erik tells him, soft but inarguable, “all of you, I love you,” and then touches his finger, wet with Charles’s mouth, to Charles’s cock. Plays with the leaking slit, spreading wetness over iron-hot skin. There’s a gasp, and a wobble on unsteady feet.  
  
He stops. “Too much?”  
  
“…what? No, I—no. You just—you were—I’m fine.” Blinking somewhat dazedly, but telling the truth; he’s regained balance and doesn’t seem to be in pain. Erik considers this.  
  
“You will tell me. If you’re not.”  
  
“Yes, sir.” Charles licks his lips, leaves them wet and shining. “I love you, too.”  
  
“Yes,” Erik agrees, and slips his hand lower, toying with the thick base, the intimate weight behind it, the secret line that he can follow between the curves of that backside, the tight little opening he’ll claim as his. Charles shivers again; tries to part his legs without moving, and Erik murmurs “So good, Charles,” into his ear, and observes with satisfaction the tremor of pleasure at the mingled praise and command.  
  
“You know I should correct you,” he continues, letting the words sink in as he nibbles them along the curve of that ear, as he rubs his finger over that tender space, just enough to tantalize without pushing in, “for earlier. For not listening properly. I don’t especially want to punish you, Charles, but I do think perhaps you should remember.”  
  
He can feel the fluttering of that ring of muscle, when he presses his finger to it; trying to yield, to pull, to coax him deeper. Charles is breathing rapidly, but his eyes are calm, the serenity of surrender. When Erik kisses him on the lips, he sighs and tips his head back and kisses back almost clumsily, unthinking, only feeling now. And Erik feels that nameless emotion again, too big and billowing and uncontainable for words, welling up in his heart. In his bones.  
  
“Sit,” he says. “For a second.” Charles perches on the side of the bed without comment, though there’s curiosity in the ocean-wave eyes now, venturing through the surrender-washed tides. Erik takes a deep breath—or two—reminds himself that he’s stepping away only to come back, and walks over to that treasure-chest of drawers and leather and toys.  
  
When he turns back, he’s holding a slim length of wood in one hand. Charles audibly inhales, eyes huge.  
  
“You can say no. You can always say no. I was thinking…only ten. Over the bed.” He’s not entirely sure why he’s chosen this cane, rather than the paddles or straps or a simple hairbrush. Something about the elegance of pale wood; it’s not the sort of cane Charles might use for walking, no. Far from that. And the formality of the implement seems to fit: this is their first act since the yes, since Charles accepted his proposal and his ring.  
  
Not whips. Not ever, not since that painfully honest admission: I don’t mind, you can if you want, but I’ve never really liked them…  
  
“Charles?” he says, and it’s more of a question than it ought to be, but his voice is treacherous and in love.  
  
“Yes,” Charles whispers back, equally low, consent shared between themselves and the warmly lit walls and the patter of rain. “Yes.”  
  
He releases the breath that’s been trapped in his lungs. Takes the few steps back to the bed. “Then…stand up. Lean on the bed. However you need to; I want you to be comfortable.”  
  
There’s a quick flare of amusement in all the blue, coruscating fireworks over the sea; Erik has to laugh. “No, all right, I know. You do know what I mean.”  
  
“Yes, sir,” Charles agrees demurely, though the fireworks’re still dancing, and gets to his feet, and then turns around carefully and braces himself against the mattress, letting it take some of his weight. “Love you.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik says, and comes to stand behind him. “I want you to count. Ten, and we’ll make it fast, all right?”  
  
Charles turns his head far enough to make the smile visible. Tangible in his voice, too. Tea and scones all woven up with need and desire. “Very all right, sir.”  
  
“Then…all right.” He lifts the cane, hesitates, contemplates it. He’s never actually done this before. He’s certainly had fantasies about it, and obviously Charles doesn’t object, and it’s not as if they’ve not used hands or paddles or implements on a few previous memorable occasions, but…  
  
But what if he does it wrong, or too hard? But what if Charles doesn’t stop him? But what if this also is on the list of activities Charles wouldn’t prefer but will say yes to if Erik asks? The questions band together and contrive to halt his arm in the air, and all at once he doesn’t know what to do.  
  
Charles looks up. Then pushes himself more upright, and twists around, displaying marvelous flexibility. The silver-white streak of old burn scars catches the light, along a hip, a thigh, at his temple. “Erik?”  
  
“I’m—I just—I’m sorry, I can—”  
  
“Erik,” Charles says again. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I—well, I _am_. You asked me to marry you, and I said yes, and I said I’m yours, and you said yes. I want this. I want you to do this, to me, because I like the way it feels, because I want _you_ to make me feel that way. I’ll tell you if I need to stop. I promise. And right now I’m telling you to go on. Sir.”  
  
“Charles—” There still aren’t any good words. So he leans over and offers kisses instead. The corner of that mobile mouth, the top of a shoulder, the delicious little spot just between shoulderblades. “You did say yes. To me. To being my husband.”  
  
“Yes, I did. Would you like me to say it again?”  
  
“So damn cheeky,” Erik says, because it’s talk or give in to the lurking tears, “I think you ought to be counting, instead, if you’re ready?” and Charles resettles into his previous position and says, sounding vaguely proud of himself, “Yes, sir.”  
  
Erik can’t really fault him for the emotion. After all, Charles has just rescued him again. He’s lost count of how many times, by now.  
  
He doesn’t know how to say thank you for that, how to put into words everything that he’s feeling, but he doesn’t have to. Charles has asked him for something, and that he can give.  
  
So he lifts his arm again, and swings, letting the wood whistle through the startled air.  
  
They both gasp, at the impact. He can’t help staring. One clean red line, tidily defined. Right across that perfect backside. “Charles,” he says, somewhat desperately.  
  
“Still good.” Charles is panting a little. “That…not much harder than that, please. Not any lighter…that was good…and you can make it a bit harder if you want…but not much more…”  
  
“We’ll see.” He runs a hand over the mark, testing the heat of it, the contrast with cool creamy skin on either side. “Does it hurt?”  
  
“Yes…but it’s not…it’s a good hurt. Oh. Ah, one, sir.”  
  
Erik breathes out, in amusement. Then, because after all he’s being prompted, proceeds.  
  
“Two.” Practically a moan into the sheets; the helpful mattress gathers up all the sound and holds it close. “Three. _Oh_ —four…”  
  
“Still good?”  
  
“Yes, sir.”  
  
“Good.” He pauses for a moment to admire the results. Charles is stretched over the bed before him, head bent to rest on the mattress, breath coming in wet little sobs and pants; four dark lines glow across twin fair curves, presented to him, and when he fits fingers between those submissively spread legs he can feel the thick hot length of all that need, rock-hard and begging for relief.  
  
“You do enjoy this. Knowing it, when I leave marks on you…” A hand, cupping the closest reddened cheek, adding weight and warmth; Charles groans into the bed, and those hips jerk in reply. “When you feel me every time you move, when you’re sore because of me for days, and you love that, don’t you, Charles? Knowing you belong to me?”  
  
He edits that last, in the privacy of his own head. Not _to_ ; with, instead. Charles might need the reassurance of the former, certainly in this simmering rain-drenched erotic moment, but later this evening, tomorrow morning, outside the bedroom, it’ll always be a with. Charles belongs at his side. His equal. If not more.  
  
“Tell me,” he says, in place of that. Not what Charles needs to hear. Room for that in the aftermath; here, this is about the push and pull, the intensity.  
  
“Yes,” Charles breathes, instantly. “Yours.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
He varies the next few, letting them land lower, striping ginger-cream thighs. Charles trembles under the impacts, but keeps counting, and the raggedness in that elegant voice comes from raw need, collapsing into the exquisite twinned elements of pain and pleasure.  
  
Eight, and Charles is not-quite-crying, each breath uneven and his face wet; Erik stops and comes over and kneels down beside the bed and touches his cheek. “I love you.”  
  
Charles turns his face into the caress. Answers the unasked question with a nod. So they continue.  
  
The ninth stroke lands slightly crooked and lighter than the rest, only in part inadvertent. When Charles counts that one off, he’s smiling faintly through the tears. Erik promises, “One more, only one, you’re doing so well, Charles, taking all of this for me,” and Charles sighs and a shudder runs through his body and he seems to relax into the pose.  
  
“Ten,” Erik says aloud, and the length of the cane cracks against superheated skin, and Charles whispers the word back, mirroring his.  
  
He drops the cane. Pulls Charles into his arms, on the edge of the bed. Charles lets out a small gasp, and buries his face in Erik’s neck. “Shh,” Erik tells him, and rubs his back, comforts all the wounded freckles, kisses his temple. “It’s over, you’re all right, you’re so lovely, Charles, and you are all right, you can do this, we can do this, I did tell you we could…” And there’s a nod of agreement, nonverbal but confirmation. Hearing him. Comprehending.  
  
“Perfect,” Erik tells him this time, and strokes a hand through his hair. “I love you.” Reassurance, repetition, ensuring that the words sink in. Charles nods again, and presses a kiss to his shoulder, openmouthed and undemanding, and squirms a little in his lap.  
  
“Knee all right? Yes or no.”  
  
“Yes,” Charles says to the shoulder.  
  
“Then…that means you want more?” He knows the answer’s yes from the way Charles moves against him, seeking out contact, the sapphires of those eyes all but drowned in need. He waits for the yes regardless, then moves, easing them both down onto the bed. Charles goes readily, malleable and compliant, though he does gasp when all those red lines collide with the mattress. Erik nearly feels guilty, but then hears the soft sigh and sees the movement, deliberate this time, Charles wanting all that sensation, and then he feels rather pleased with himself instead.  
  
He’s done this. He’s got them here. For Charles.  
  
He sits up. Says, “Wait here,” and peels off his jeans faster than he ever has in his life—Charles props himself up on a elbow to watch—and then pauses, having had one more potentially fantastic idea. “Charles?”  
  
The question’s present in the eyes, but doesn’t quite emerge.  
  
“You did say…last time…I could, if you wanted…you always liked restraints, before…” But that’s not an actual question, and Charles is at this point too far under, wordless in the face of sparkling pain-tinged euphoria, to process anything less direct.  
  
“May I—” No. Not that phrasing, either. Damn. “I’m going to get one of your scarves. Your favorite one, that we used that very first night…we could use it again. Only your hands. Is that still all right?”  
  
Another nod; he starts to hop off the bed, then stops. “I think…I need more than that. I need you to say yes, Charles, I’m sorry, I know it’s difficult. Please.”  
  
“…it is,” Charles says, after a minute, picking words like stepping-stones through clinging hazy terrain. “Difficult. I can’t—I’m not the one telling you what to do, sir.”  
  
“Oh—no, I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry.” He bends down to kiss that nose with its off-center freckles, in penitence. “I know you don’t want that. I’m only asking you to tell me yes or no. Whether you feel safe. Understand?”  
  
Charles breathes in and out and adjusts position again, red-hot marks shifting along the sheets. There’re a few different expressions running through those eyes, but too swift for Erik to follow. He waits, poised naked at the edge of the bed.  
  
“…yes,” Charles says. “And that’s both, sir. Yes, I understand. Yes, you can.”  
  
“I love you,” Erik whispers. His heart aches with it.  
  
“Yes, sir,” Charles agrees, and then very pointedly stretches both arms up over his head, fingertips brushing the satiny wood of the headboard.  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Erik says, and throws himself across the room and into the drawers and back. Dark blue silk, the shade of a summer twilight, tangles around his fingers. He unwinds it, more deliberately once he notices Charles watching.  
  
He collects both unprotesting wrists in his, kneeling on the bed. Winds fabric around them, slowly, letting each loop and slide register. Seems to be working, from the way Charles shivers and goes still, legs falling further apart. Through the conveniently carved wood of that antique headboard, then back, into a knot that’s as complex as his own impatience will permit. It’s lopsided and hurriedly tied, but Charles won’t be able to get out of it, and that’s the important part.  
  
Must be for Charles, too. Who’s watching him with endlessly blue eyes, smiling appreciatively, and that look goes straight to Erik’s libido and stays there, an arrow of pure want running down his spine.  
  
“Good?” He has to know. He’ll always need to know.  
  
Charles nods again.  
  
“Not talking?”  
  
A pause, a head-tilt, a headshake. But the look in those eyes is a familiar one, the sort of look that means Charles would quite like to be kissed but isn’t asking, so Erik leans down and proceeds to kiss him thoroughly, tongue plundering that mouth, taking every last tiny gasp and moan and shiver as his due.  
  
The rain’s falling outside in a steady rhythm, dependable and muffling. It seals the world away, and them inside, an oasis of gold and blue and bare skin and soft breath. His hand in Charles’s hair, and the metal shimmer on that fourth finger.  
  
The presence of it sparks an impulse, not even a thought; and he’s saying Charles’s name before he even realizes it. Sea-jewel eyes find his, and wait, despite the breathless tension in bound arms, the flushed and doubtless aching arousal, dripping sticky onto freckles. And he’s begun, now, so he might as well go on. Ask the question. Know for sure.  
  
“If you’d like…if you’d still like…” He trails his thumb over the exposed line of that pale throat, vulnerable and dotted with twinkling freckle-stars. They don’t flinch; not afraid. “I asked you once if you’d wear a collar. For me. If I made one for you. And I know…I know you might not, after—” After Shaw. After Shaw’s gruesome parody version.  
  
“You can say no. I promise I won’t be upset. But if you want to, only if you want to, the offer’s still open, Charles.”  
  
Charles doesn’t answer right away. Swallows, under the weight of Erik’s thumb, resting over that pulse-point. Shuts his eyes.  
  
Erik wants to bite his lip, to look away, to take back the words. Stupid. Wrong and stupid. Of course Charles won’t say yes, how can he, with the memories stamped into the now-faded bruises around his throat, Shaw laughing and pulling the constricting loop tighter?  
  
He opens his mouth to apologize, hopelessly, and just before he can get the words out Charles says, “I would like that, I think.”  
  
Suddenly voiceless, Erik simply sits there and stares down at him.  
  
Charles smiles a little. Twists one wrist in the silky grip of the scarf; not trying to get away, only testing the feel of it, smiling again at the sensation of material against skin. “I mean it, Erik.”  
  
“…you do.” He sets his hand there as well. Then, because that’s not quite right, walks his fingers up and rests them in the center of Charles’s palm, over lines and creases, memorizing them the way he’s never bothered to know his own. Charles folds his fingers down over them, holding Erik’s there like he’s cradling a precious rarity.  
  
“Yes, I do. I want to…” With an awkwardly graceful head-tip backwards to glance at the ring, gleaming fantastically in the golden streams of lamplight. “I want to be yours. I know—I know you’ll say I am. And I _am_. But this, if you asked me for this…something you’d make for me, and I’d wear for you, at home, in the bedroom…it would feel right. I’d feel right. Sir.”  
  
“You want the reminder.” He can believe that, listening. “The weight of it. If I put it on you, if you can’t remove it on your own, without me…”  
  
Charles’s eyes meet his, with a kind of calm shining joy, blue and pure as crystal, then.  
  
And Erik says, “Yes,” and kisses him, while the rain puddles on the ground and drips in a drum-song from the eaves.  
  
The lampglow paints Charles’s skin in shadow and gilt. Illuminates all the freckles with halos of soft gold. Turns the expanse of the bed into a secret treasure-house, just for them.  
  
Erik kisses him again, kisses him everywhere, the line of his throat, his shoulder, one dusky nipple, the other. Lower, leaving the print of his mouth on one hip, color coming up under fair skin to bruise wine-dark; Charles moans, sounding abandoned to sensation, debauched and drunk on Erik’s lips against his body.  
  
“I’ll make it to match your ring,” Erik tells him, words floating over newly-formed marks, “so that you’ll think of it, every day, everywhere you go, you’ll know that you’re coming home to me and my hands on you, all mine, Charles…” and Charles breathes his name and moves restlessly in the restraints, Erik’s hand holding his leg in place, authority and precaution all in one.  
  
“I want you,” Erik says, between sucking and nipping and teasing another pink-purple memento into the tender skin of that inner thigh, “and I love you, and I want to be inside you, Charles, I want to fuck you until I’m spilling out of you, you so full of me that you’re dripping with it, filthy and loose and completely mine…” Charles shudders everywhere; his cock jumps, but he doesn’t come, and Erik kisses the bruise he’s just left for that. His own erection throbs, heavy with need, between his legs.  
  
“Don’t move,” he says, and grabs the open lube from the bedside table, and spills it over fingers with indecent haste—it gets on the sheets and the bed and they’ll need to do laundry, but that’s wonderful too, everything’s wonderful—and Charles opens up around his hand so easily, already relaxed and pliant and trusting as he works two and three fingers inside.  
  
There, that spot; and Charles gasps his name, hips snapping upward; Erik puts more effort into holding him down, and does it again, and then again, until Charles is moaning inarticulately and rocking into his fingers, orgasm no longer a single imminent starburst but drawn out into delirious ongoing torment. Erik wraps his other hand around that straining erection and strokes, and Charles moves with him, forgetting the order, lost in bliss; Erik stops touching his cock and slips the hand beneath his body, finding those fading red lines from the caning and then squeezing hard, and the shocked tiny cry nearly results in his own orgasm on the spot, untouched. He’s never heard that particular sound before. He wants to hear it more.  
  
But he has promised—until I’m spilling out of you, he’d said—and he wants to feel that body around his, tight and yielding and giving way for him, and he replaces his fingers with his cock and pushes in in one smooth motion, no resistance, only the slick close drag of muscles clenching around him.  
  
Charles moans again, eyes closed, when Erik sinks all the way inside him to the hilt. With the unsticky hand, with heroic self-restraint, he taps at the freckles over a cheekbone. “Charles—”  
  
Charles opens the eyes, and there’s a smile glinting back there in the sea-spray, and it beckons him on.  
  
He doesn’t lift both legs to his shoulders, the way he once might’ve. One they can manage, though, and so they do, his hand shoving that good knee up and his cock plunging even deeper, Charles taking it all, and the angle’s right and he moves harder, faster, the way his body’s been screaming for; Charles can’t move much, but meets every thrust with an arch of his own, fearless and hungry and euphoric and not fragile at all.  
  
Those sounds, moans and gasps and skin on skin, get louder. He can feel the heat of the welts, the ones that he’s left on fair thighs and firm flesh, when their hips snap together; Charles’s lips shape his name, head tossing on the pillow, hands twisting in the restraints, and Erik cups a hand over his backside and finds that burning skin and leans down and whispers, “ _Now_ , Charles,” and digs fingernails in, hard.  
  
Charles screams. And his body tightens impossibly everywhere, clenching around Erik’s length inside him; his cock jerks, and whiteness splashes over his chest, his stomach, even his chin, painting all the freckles with release. Erik feels the tightening in his own body, balls drawing tense and taut, the shudders of Charles’s climax rippling along his cock, and then he’s coming too, slamming into that slick passage once more, twice, as the lightning hits and the world whites out around them.  
  
As the peak ebbs, he pushes into Charles a few more leisurely times, prolonging the sensation, in and out of that trembling and well-used space. Charles moans, barely audible, and shivers, a full-body reaction, too sensitive now and on the edge of overstimulation: the line between too much and reckless more.  
  
He _wants_ more, wants to do more, to see how much Charles can take like this, but it’s not a good idea. And he has to be responsible; Charles trusts him, and he won’t let those blue eyes down.  
  
He eases himself out, noting with some pride that he’s fulfilled that promise and left Charles messy and open and sloppy with himself, trickles of white following him down an exhausted thigh. Charles whimpers, empty, and those bound hands twitch as if trying to reach for him, surprised to find they can’t, but accepting the restraints all over again.  
  
Erik, still breathing hard and feeling wrung out and exhilarated down to the bone, fumbles with his knot and gets it undone; the hands fall onto the pillow, but otherwise don’t move. There’re faint red spots around those wrists, the repeated rub of fabric over skin, but not bad, and they’ll fade. The blue eyes’re closed, though. Not looking at him.  
  
“Charles,” he whispers, or tries to; his voice is hoarse. “Charles, I—are you all right?”  
  
One more nod; still not talking, then. Erik stretches out beside him, puts an arm around him, pulls him close, heedless of stickiness and sweat and other bodily fluids. Charles’s hair tickles his nose. And those shorter sturdy muscles fit just right against his.  
  
Charles shivers a little, and hides his face in Erik’s chest; Erik kisses the top of his head, rubs his back, holds him, tries talking: I’m here, that was incredible, I love you. Charles needs the anchor, he knows. And he wants to be one. Because he’s in love, and the rainy day and the infinite universe and the entire future take notice and straighten up: this is him and Charles together, and they’re going to be amazing.  
  
After a comfortably indeterminate while, he feels Charles relax, the lingering aftershocks giving way to a kind of peaceful tranquility, sated and weary and content. A while after that, when he kisses the line of the eyebrow within reach, he feels Charles kiss him back, a quiet touch of lips to his chest.  
  
“Better?”  
  
“Yes…” Charles lifts his head so their eyes catch. “Thank you.”  
  
“You don’t have to—”  
  
“I do, though.” Charles leans forward, kisses him on the lips, sudden and sweet. “I want to. Thank you, sir.”  
  
“Are we—are you still—you honestly don’t have to. Not now.”  
  
“Only that time. I felt like saying it. You’re very warm.”  
  
“Too warm?”  
  
“No, I like it…” One hand sneaks up to toy deviously with Erik’s right nipple. Erik briefly reconsiders his stance on second rounds. But Charles has to be done. Must be exhausted everywhere.  
  
“Are you all right?” He runs a hand over one hip, and lower, tracing the fading marks for emphasis. “Not too much?”  
  
“Exactly enough, I think. It’s still raining, isn’t it?”  
  
“Yes?” Possibly he should be more worried, if Charles has only just now noticed that fact. “Are you sure—”  
  
“I’m all right.” Charles tests wrists, bending them; stretches out the good leg and curls it back up, then more gingerly stretches the other. Erik’s holding his breath, though he can’t recall when he’d begun doing so, and is beginning to feel dizzy.  
  
But that smile is open and brilliant and sincere, no more soreness than could reasonably be expected, and Erik exhales and gets his arms around all the freckles again, probably too tightly.  
  
“Ow,” Charles grumbles. “Erik, I do need to breathe.”  
  
“Sorry.”  
  
“No, I like that too. You here, holding me…I’ve always liked that. That first night, when we met, and we slept in your bed…you held onto me then. And I was absolutely petrified.”  
  
“You—because I scared you? Charles, I—”  
  
“No.” One more kiss. “Because I did like it. You told me I didn’t have to be scared, you wouldn’t hurt me, and you played chess with me, and I fell asleep with you. And I woke up knowing I wanted to do all of that again.”  
  
“You can,” Erik promises. Real promises, himself vowing to be there, to love someone else, the vows he’ll make again at the altar but is making in his heart already. His mother, he thinks, out of nowhere, would’ve been proud. And she would’ve liked Charles. “You can.”  
  
“I know.” Charles pauses, then grins, pure mischief with sweat-damp hair and elated tiredness. “Because you’re marrying me. You’re going to be my husband, sir.”  
  
Erik lifts both eyebrows. “ _Your_ husband?”  
  
“Perhaps I should choose a different pronoun?” That grin is positively impish, now. “You’re certainly no one else’s husband. But what would that make me, I wonder…”  
  
Erik flips him onto his back, growls, “ _Mine_ ,” and kisses those lips until they give in and start laughing, under his. “Yes, sir.”  
  
“Good. How’re you feeling? I mean here.” He had caught the almost unnoticeable flinch, when red cane-welts’d encountered the mattress.  
  
“I’m…it hurts a little. Not bad. I’m mostly just tired, I think.”  
  
“Hmm.” There’s lotion in one of those drawers; he’s off the bed and back before Charles has time to do more than blink. “Stay like this. On your side.” It’s a compromise; touch would be easier if Charles could lie face-down, but he’s not asking for that. No pressure on that leg.  
  
Charles gazes at him with sleepy curiosity, which gets instantly transmuted to sheer bliss at the first touch of cool aloe. “I love you.”  
  
“Me, or the lotion? I said don’t move. Not even to kiss me.”  
  
“Both. And I don’t think I can. Too comfortable, sir.”  
  
“Kitten,” Erik says, amused, as Charles stretches and all but purrs under his ministrations; one blue eye peeks out from under hair to offer a mock scowl. “In English, even. If you’re going to use the pet names, at least stick to German. Less obvious.”  
  
“If you say so. Better?” They’ll need to shower, but not yet. Charles can rest first.  
  
He lets his hands drift, drawn by beckoning freckle pinwheels. They entice him over to that firm thigh, to the line of Charles’s cock, spent and nestled into dark curls, but stirring to awareness with the touch. “Mmm,” Charles says, and closes his eyes. “Yes.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
“I don’t want to hurt you…”  
  
“You won’t,” Charles says, and it’s half teasing, but the blue of those eyes is sincere. Complete faith, radiating through all the oceans. “I know you won’t. I want you.”  
  
“I want you,” Erik tells him, and takes him in hand, works him leisurely, unhurriedly, feeling Charles grow harder under his touch. He doesn’t intend to get off, himself, though he can feel his body’s inevitable response; that resolution fails when Charles reaches for him and pulls him down into the bed, face to face and so close that their shafts slide together, slippery with lotion and the clean herbal scent of aloe. Charles pushes up into him, and Erik wraps his hand around them both, thankful that he has long fingers, and finds a rhythm, hard heat and slick skin sliding together, and it’s less a crashing wave than a slow rolling one this time, deep and profound and relentless, washing through them as one.  
  
They hold each other, breathing in unison, foreheads pressed together, in the aftermath. Strands of Charles’s hair are stuck to Erik’s face. He doesn’t mind.  
  
“Erik,” Charles says, drowsily, and then looks surprised.  
  
Erik says “I love you,” because those’re the first words that come to mind whenever he sees Charles, and he can say them now, every time. “What is it?”  
  
“I just…” Charles wriggles a hand where it’s been trapped between them on Erik’s shoulder. “I saw this. When I opened my eyes, just now.”  
  
The ring beams back at them, benevolent and proud. Catches the rays of gilded light from the bedside table, and flings them all around the room to share.  
  
“I love seeing it,” Charles says. “I love it, I love wearing it, and I love you.”


	23. Epilogue: Emma Gets The Last Word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Erik and Charles ask Emma for a favor. No warnings for this last bit, unless maybe for fluff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done!
> 
> Thank you, everyone who's left kudos and comments (which I will catch up on answering eventually, I promise!) and encouragement and kept me excited to keep writing this and given me ideas along the way. Thank you. This would not exist, certainly not in this form, without you all; so really it's as much yours as it is mine.
> 
> You're all amazing, and I love you. *all the sparkly hearts*

Emma leans back in her luxurious white-leather chair, tries to recall the last time she’s been at a loss for words, and finally says, “You want me to _what?_ ”  
  
“Marry us.” Charles sounds slightly smug; not in the arrogant careless way he might’ve once, but more genuinely amused at her reaction. The amusement invites the world in, this time, instead of keeping it out. “It’s legal in New York. And you can get ordained online. I’ve checked.”  
  
“Charles…” She stares at him. And therefore also at Erik Lehnsherr, because they’re standing there together, in her office, smiling. They can’t even hold hands like normal people; no, Erik’s got a long arm draped over Charles’s shoulders and Charles has his around Erik’s waist, and they look disgustingly happy that way. “Charles, you know what you’re asking?”  
  
“I’m asking my friend—without whom I’d’ve never met Erik—to officiate at our wedding, yes.” Unruffled, unflappable, and, interestingly, doing all the talking; this is like the Charles she’s used to, but different, too. If she had to pick a word, she might even say _comfortable_.  
  
Because he’s thrown her off-balance with the friend comment, she says, “You know society will laugh at you. Charles Xavier, getting married to a disreputable artist, ceremony presided over by a woman who’s seen detailed reports about most of them naked.”  
  
“If I minded that, I wouldn’t ask you. Most of my parents’ friends couldn’t care less about me these days anyway. No more corporate politics or trade secrets to give away.” At that, Erik leans down to kiss him, a touch of lips to the nearest temple. It’s an intimate gesture, offered without care for whoever might be watching. Emma has the oddest impulse to glance away, to give them their privacy.  
  
It’s her bloody office. She sits up straighter. “What makes you think I’d want to, in any case?”  
  
There’re lots of reasons—starting with the plans they’ve described to her, a kind of shelter or halfway house or art studio-educational institute hybrid, a place she can send her employees and their families for safety or support or even for fun; continuing with the argument that said employees might revolt if she says no; ending with the way Charles is practically radiating happiness from blue eyes—but she’s Emma Frost, and she can’t be expected to do something for nothing.  
  
Even if Charles _has_ called her his friend.  
  
“Because,” Erik says, the first time he’s spoken since the hellos, “it’ll make Charles happy.”  
  
She examines him, too. Not the angry thin-lipped man she’d seen gazing back from his prospective client file; no, the man in front of her carries his adoration for Charles like a banner, proud and unashamed. And smiles as if he means it.  
  
He does meet her eyes meaningfully, inches above that wavy-haired head. That look announces: Charles can have anything he wants, and I’m damned well going to make that happen. Emma, who does understand, can’t resist one last needle.  
  
“Aren’t you Jewish, Mr Lehnsherr? Wouldn’t a nontraditional ceremony be frowned upon?”  
  
“Oh—” Charles twists to look up at Erik, eyes wide. “I didn’t think—I’m so sorry, Erik, would you want—”  
  
“Hush, _kätzchen_. No.” For some reason this makes Charles blush a lovely pink under all the freckles, and then try to argue. “But, Erik—”  
  
“I don’t care. My mother would—” Erik pauses, glances at Emma, resumes as if reassuring Charles is more important. Emma resists the impulse to sniff in annoyance.  
  
“My mother would want us to be happy,” Erik says, and runs his hand through Charles’s hair. “It’s not as if I practice…religiously…”  
  
Good god. Erik Lehnsherr’s in her office, and has made a joke. Not a terribly good one, but nevertheless. A joke.  
  
“…and if this will make you happy, then yes. To everything. Pineapple martinis. Bacon-chocolate cupcakes. Raiding your ancestral wine cellar.”  
  
“I didn’t mention that last one, and it’s our wine cellar, but I like your idea.”  
  
“I like you.”  
  
“I—”  
  
“Charles!” Emma says, loudly. They jump apart, looking guilty, though not as guilty as they should. “How large an event were you planning?”  
  
“Does that mean you’ll do it?”  
  
“Perhaps. How large?”  
  
“Not very, really.” Charles glances up at Erik again; the expression’s not one she’s used to seeing in those sapphire eyes, but it’s defined instantly when Erik lunges for the closest chair and tucks him into it. Charles smiles a little; Erik puts a hand on his shoulder, and Charles’s hand finds it without looking.  
  
“You. My sister, and Erik’s friend Azazel—the one who sent him to you in the first place, he’s a performance artist, escapes and illusions, you might like him—”  
  
Emma sighs.  
  
“—and Moira and Hank and, well, anyone from here. Who wants to come.”  
  
“Are you mad? They’ll _all_ want to come!”  
  
“Our lawn is big enough for that,” Charles says cheerfully, and Erik stands at his side like a knight beside a throne, straight and fierce and devoted. Charles is wearing a ring, she notices, on the lifted hand. It shimmers in infinite shades of metal in the light.  
  
“You’re sure about this. Both of you.”  
  
It’s Erik who says, simply, “Yes,” but Charles meets her gaze and nods. Yes.  
  
Emma sighs again. “If you’re going to steal all my employees in any case…and if you’re promising me my pick from the legendary Xavier wine cellars…”  
  
Charles’s smile lights up the room. Outshines even the flawless white décor of her office. “So you will?”  
  
“I’m going to regret this,” Emma says, “but yes.”  
  
“Thank you,” Charles says, looking at her.  
  
“Charles,” Erik says, looking at him.  
  
“I’m fine, the knee’s only tired, it doesn’t even hurt—”  
  
“Tired?”  
  
Charles raises an eyebrow. Erik scowls. Charles smiles; Erik visibly gives in. “Fine. Chess in the park. _One_ game, and only because I promised. Then home. I’ll buy you pizza on the way if you don’t argue.”  
  
“Can that also involve pineapple?”  
  
Erik sighs, then looks thoughtful, then bends down to whisper into an ear. Charles says, sounding delighted, “Really? I’d’ve thought we’d have enough evidence for that by now, but if you’re suggesting another taste-test for scientific accuracy—”  
  
“Get out of my office, you two.”  
  
“Oh, sorry—”  
  
Erik whispers something else which makes Charles blush _again_ , but keeps a firm grip on his arm as he gets up from the chair, and falls into step with one hand hovering protectively at the small of Charles’s back as they head for the door.  
  
“You cannot _possibly_ beat that record,” Charles retorts, and then, hastily, “Really very sorry, Emma, we’re going—” and the door swings shut on Erik murmuring what sounds like the words “I do enjoy a challenge…” and Emma very slowly leans forward and puts her elbows on her desk and hides her face in her hands until they’ve thoroughly gone.  
  
And then she sits up. And grabs a sheet of paper, and a pen. She has some appointment reports to look over, but that can wait. She’s got a wedding ceremony to compose.  
  
She taps her pen against the paper, and wonders whether she’s allowed to mention how they met. It’d be an awfully good story to tell.  


 

  
_when I come home, oh I know I'm gonna be_   
_I'm gonna be the man who comes back home to you_   
_and if I grow old, well I know I'm gonna be_   
_I'm gonna be the man who's growing old with you..._   



End file.
